
Gass ""\ 
Book_il 



LIFE AND LAND OF BURNS, 



ALLAN CUNNI vn-T \\T, 



WITH C0NTR1BDTI0N3 



THOMAS CAMPBELL, ESQ. 



TO WHICH IS PREFIXED 



AN ESSAY ON THE GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF BURNS, 



THOMAS CARLY; E, ESQ. 



NEW YORK: 

J. & H. G. LANGLEY, No, 57 CHATHAM STREET. 

1841. 






Printed bt R. Craighead, 
112 Fulton Street. 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



V- 

Whatever attaches to the memory of the " Bard of Scotland" can- 
not fail to excite, in all the lovcx's of song, intense and universal inte- 
rest. The splendid productions of his muse, no longer the peculiar 
property of his own favored Land, have become a rich contribution to 
the whole " Republic of Letters," while they take rank among those of 
Homer, Shakspeare, and Schiller, with a host of others, whose names 
are treasured up as " household deities." In issuing the present Vol- 
ume, the publishers feel assured that it will prove one of deep and 
permanent value, since it comprises a new Memoir of the Poet, by 
Allan Cunningham, one of the most competent of his biographers ; 
a series of graphic historical Notices of the Localities rendered classic 
by his muse ; together with some Original Letters, never before printed 
in America, completing the entire Series of his Epistolary Correspond- 
ence; and an analytical and cijitical Essay on his genius and writings, 
by Thomas Carlyle, which, for its critical acumen, fine discriminating 
taste and power, may be regarded as unsurpassed in the annals of 
literary criticism. As a supplemental volume to all editions of the 
writings of Burns hitherto published, this workjgaust prove of intrin- 
sic value, since it will not only be found necessary to their completion, 
but, being illustrative of his works, will also be of important service 
to the full appreciation of the author. 

THE PUBLISHERS. 



CONTENTS 



Advertisement, "i 

Critical Essay, by Carlyle, 1 

Life of Robert Burns, by Cunningham, 69 

The Land of Burns, 1^5 

Robert Burns, Portraits of, ^^^ 

Birth-place of Burns, ^^^ 

Tarn O'Shanter, ^'73 

The Brigs of Ayr, 1'7'7 

The Holy Fair 180 

James Glencairn Burns, 183 

Highland Mary, 1 86 

Death and Doctor Hornbook, 189 

The Cotter's Saturday Night, 192 

The Country Lassie, , 195 

Duncan Gray, 198 

Mrs. Burns, 201 

Burns and Gavin Hamilton at Nanse Tinnock's, 204 

Willie Brewed a Peck o' Maut, 208 

Peggy. — Now Westlin Win's, 211 

Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn, 214 

TheBirksof Aberfeldy, 218 

John Anderson my Jo, 221 

The Wounded Hare, 224 

Naebody, 228 

The Vision, 232 

a2 



VI CONTENTS. 

The Poor and Honest Sodger, 235 

Dr. Currie, 238 

Address to the Deil, 242 

Burns's Interview with Lord Daer, 246 

Captain Grose, 250 

The Farmer's Auld Mare Maggie, 253 

Man was made to Mourn, 256 

A Winter Night, 259 

Sic a Wife as Willie had, 262 

The Spirits of the Brigs of Ayr, 266 

Witches' Dance in Tarn O'Shanter, 270 

Cora Lynn, .... 274 

Address to the Tooth-ache, 277 

Green grow the Rashes, O ! 281 

Husband, husband, cease your strife, 285 

The Banks of Doon, 288 

Second Epistle to Davie, a brother poet, 291 

Interior of the Birth-place of Burns, 294 

The Rigs o' Barley, 297 

EUisland, 300 

A Family in Heaven, 304 

Globe Close, Dumfries, 308 

A Man's a man for a' that 312 

Wallace Tower, Ayr, 315 

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, 318 

The Tweed : Coldstream Bridge, 321 

TheLassofBallochmyle, 324 

Original Letters, hitherto unpublished, 329 

I. To Mr. John Kennedy, 329 

II. To Mr. Aiken, 330 

III. To Mr. John Kennedy, 331 

IV. To Mr. John Kennedy, 332 

V. To Mr. John Kennedy, 332 



CONTENTS. Yll 

VI. To Mr. James Burness, 333 

VII. To Dr. Archibald Laurie, 335 

VIII. To Mr. Gavin Hamilton, , 335 

IX. To Mr. Sibbald, : 337 

X. To the Earl of Glencairn, 337 

XI. To Mr. William Dunbar, 338 

XII. To Mr. James Johnson, 339 

XIII. To Mr. Pattison, 340 

XIV. To Mr. James Smith, 341 

XV. To Robert Ainslee, Esq., 343 

XVI. To Robert Ainslee, Esq., 344 

XVII. To Charles Hay, Esq., 346 

XVIII. To Mr. William Dunbar, 346 

XIX. To Mr. William Burns, 348 

XX. To Mr. William Burns, 349 

XXI. To Lady WinitVed Maxwell Constable, 350 

XXII. To Provost Maxwell, 351 

XXIII. To Mr. Sutherland, 353 

XXIV. To Mr. William Dunbar, 354 

XXV. To Dr. Anderson, 356 

XXVI. To Wilham Tytler, Esq., 357 

XXVII. To Mr. William Dunbar, 357 

XXVIII. To Mrs. Graham, 358 

XXIX. To Colonel Fullarton, 359 

XXX. To Mr. Thompson, 360 

XXXI. To Mr. Clarke, 361 

XXXII. To Mr. James Armour 362 



CRITICAL ESSAY 

ON THE- 

GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF BURNS, 
BY THOMAS CARLYLE. 



In the modern arfangements of society, it is no uncom- 
mon thing that a man of genius must, like Butler, " ask 
for bread and receive a stone;" for, in spite of our grand 
maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means the high- 
est excellence that men are most forward to recognise. 
The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his 
reward in his own day ; but the wrriter of a true poem, 
like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the 
contrary. We do not know whether it is not an aggrava- 
tion of the injustice, that there is generally a posthumous 
retribution. Robert Burns, in the course of nature, might 
yet have been living ; but his short life was spent in toil 
and penury ; and he died, in the prime of his manhood, 
miserable and neglected ; and yet already a brave mauso- 
leum shines over his dust, and more than one splendid 
monument has been reared in other places to his fame : 
the street where he languished in poverty is called by his 
name ; the highest personages in our literature have been 
proud to appear as his commentators and admirers, and 
1 



^ CRITICAL ESSAY. 

here is the sixth narrative of his Life that has been given 
to the world !* 

Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for 
this new^ attempt on such a subject : but his readers, 
we believe, will readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will 
censure only the performance of his task, not the choice 
of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that 
cannot easily become either trite or exhausted; and 
will probably gain, rather than lose in its dimensions 
by the distance to which it is removed by Time. No 
man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet : and this 
is probably true ; but the fault is at least as likely to be 
the valet's as the hero's; for it is certain that to the 
vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are not distant. 
It is difficult for men to believe that the man, the mere man 
whom they see, nay perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their 
side through the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of 
finer clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining ac- 
quaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbor of John 
a Combe's, had snatched an hour or two from the preser- 
vation of his game, and written us a Life of Shakspeare ! 
What dissertations should we not have had, — not on 
Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the wool-trade and deer- 
stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws ! and how the 
Poacher became a Player ; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. 
John had Christian bowels, and did not push him to ex- 
tremities ! In like manner we believe, with respect to 
Bums, that till the companions of his pilgrimage, the 
Honorable Excise Commissioners, and the Gentlemen of 
the Caledonian Hunt, and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and 
all the Squires and Earls, equally with the Ayr wiiters, 
and the New and Old Light Clergy, whom he had to do 

*Life of Robert Bums, by J. G. Lockhart. 



CRITICAL ESSAY. - 



with, shall have become invisible in the darkness of the 
past, or visible only by light borrowed from A?'* juxtaposi- 
tion, it will be difficult to measure him by any true standard, 
or to estimate what he really was and did, in the eigh- 
teenth century, for his country and the world. It will be 
difficult, we say, but still a fair problem for literary his- 
torians ; and repeated attempts will give us repeated ap- 
proximations. 

His former biographers have done something, no doubt, 
but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie 
and Mr. AValker, the principal of these writers, have both, 
we think, mistaken one essentially important thing : their 
own and the world's true relation to their author, and the 
style in which it became such men to think and to speak 
of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the poet truly ; more, 
perhaps, than he avowed to his readers, or even to him- 
self; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain pa- 
tronizing, apologetic air ; as if the polite public might think 
it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of sci- 
ence, a scholar, and gentleman, should do such honor to 
a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his 
fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith ; and re- 
gret that the first and kindest of all our poet's biographers 
should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly 
what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the 
same kind : and both err alike in presenting us with a de- 
tached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, vir- 
tues, and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting 
character as a living unity. This, however, is not paint- 
ing a portrait, but gauging the length and breadth of the 
several features, and jotting down their dimensions in 
arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much as this : for 
we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments tho 
mind could be so measured and gauged. 



4 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both 
these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and 
remarkable man the public voice has now pronounced him 
to be ; and in delineating him, he has avoided the method 
of separate generalities, and rather sought for charac- 
teristic incidents, habits, actions, sayings ; in a word, for 
aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked and 
lived among his fellows. The book, accordingly, with 
all its deficiencies, gives more insight, we think, into the 
true character of Barns, than any prior biography, though, 
being written on the very popular and condensed scheme 
of an article for Constable's MiscellaJiy, it has less depth 
than we could have wished and expected from a writer of 
such power, and contains rather more, and more multi- 
farious quotations, than belong of right to an original 
production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's own writing is gene- 
rally so good, so clear, direct and nervous, that we seldom 
wish to see it making place for another man's. However, 
the spirit of the work is throughout candid, tolerant, and 
anxiously conciliating ; compliments and praises are libe- 
rally distributed, on all hands, to great and small ; and, as 
Mr. Morris Birkbeck observes of the society in the back- 
woods of America, " the courtesies of polite life are never 
lost sight of for a moment." But there are better things 
than these in the volume, and we can safely testify, not only 
that it is easily and pleasantly read a first time, but may 
even be without difficulty read again. 

Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the problem 
of Burns's Biogi'aphy has yet been adequately solved. 
We do not allude so much to deficiency of facts or docu- 
ments — though of these we are still every day receiving 
some fresh accession — as to the limited and imperfect 
application of them to the great end of Biography. Our 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 5 

notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant, 
but if an individual is really of consequence enough to 
have his life and character recorded for public remem- 
brance, we have aWays been of opinion, that the public 
ought to be made acquainted with all the inward springs 
and relations of his character. How did the world and 
man's life, from his particular position, represent them- 
selves to his mind 1 How did co-existing circumstances 
modify him from without ; how did he modify these from 
within ] With what endeavors and what efficacy rule 
over them ; with what resistance and what suffering sink 
under them 1 In one word, what and how produced was 
the effect of society on him ; what and how produced 
wa-s his effect on society 1 He who should answer these 
questions, in regard to any individual, would, as we 
believe, furnish a model of perfection in biography. Few 
individuals, indeed, can deserve such a study; and many 
lives will be written, and, for the gratification of innocent 
curiosity, ought to be written, and read, and forgotten, 
which ar^ not in this sense hiograjpliies. But Burns, if we 
mistake not, is one of these few individuals ; and such a 
study, at least with such a result, he has not yet obtained. 
Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but 
scanty and feeble ; but we offer them with good-will, and 
trust they may meet with acceptance from those for whom 
they are intended. 

Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy ; and 
was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual 
fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily 
subsiding into censure and neglect ; till his early and most 
mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm for him, 
which, especially as there was now nothing to be done, and 
much to be spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own 
1* 



6 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

time. It is true, the " nine days" have long since elapsed ; 
and the very continuance of this clamor proves that Burns 
was no vulgar wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judg- 
ments, where, as years passed by, he has come to rest 
more and more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, 
and may now be well nigh shorn of that casual radiance, 
he appears not only as a true British poet, but as one of 
the most considerable British men of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Let it not be objected that he did little. He did 
much, if we consider where and how. If the work per- 
formed was small, we must remember that he had his 
very materials to discover ; for the metal he worked in 
lay hid under the desert, where no eye but his had guessed 
its existence ; and we may almost say, that with his own 
hand he had to construct the tools for fashioning it. For 
he found himself in deepest obscurity, without help, with- 
out instruction, without model ; or with models only of 
the meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it were, 
in the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled 
with all the weapons and engines which man's skill has 
been able to devise from the earliest time; and he works, 
accordingly, Avith a strength boiTowed from all past ages. 
How different is Ms state who stands on the outside of 
that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, 
or remain for ever shut against him ! His means are the 
commonest and rudest ; the mere work done is no mea- 
sure of his strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine 
may remove mountains ; but no dwarf will hew them 
down with the pickaxe ; and he must be a Titan that hurls 
them abroad with his arms. 

It ' is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. 

Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and 

^in a condition the most disadvantageous, where his mind, 



CRITICAL ESSAY 



if it accomplislied aught, must accomplish it under the 
pressure of continual bodily toil, nay, of penury and des- 
ponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with no 
furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor mail's 
hut, and the rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay for his 
standard of beauty, he sinks not under all these impedi- 
ments. Through the fogs and darkness of that obscure 
region, his eagle eye discerns the true relations of the 
world and human life ; he grows into intellectual strength, 
and trains himself into intellectual expertness. Impelletl 
by the irrepressible movement of his inward spirit, he 
struggles forward into the general view, and with haughty 
modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labor, a 
gift which Time has now pronounced imperishable. Add 
to all this, that his darksome, drudging childhood and 
youth was by far the kindliest era of his whole life ; and 
that he died in his thirty-seventh year : and then ask if it be 
strange that his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, 
or that his genius attained no mastery in its art ] Alas, 
his Sun shone as through a tropical toraado ; and the pale 
Shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon ! Shrouded in such 
baleful vapors, the genius of Burns was never seen in clear 
azure splendor, enlightening the world ; but some beams 
from it did, by fits, pierce through ; and it tinted those 
clouds with rainbow and orient colors into a glory and 
stem grandeur, which men silently gazed on with won- 
der and tears ! 

We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is exposition 
rather than admiration that our readers require of us here ; 
and yet to avoid some tendency to that side is no easy 
matter. We love Burns, and we pity him ; and love and 
pity are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes 
thought, should be a cold business ; we are not so sure of 



o CRITICAL ESSAY. 

this ; but, at all events, our concei;n with Burns is not ex- 
clusively that of critics. True and genial as his poetry 
must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that 
he interests and affects us. He was often advised to write 
a tragedy ; time and means were not lent him for this ; 
but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the 
deepest. We question whether the world has since wit- 
nessed so utterly sad a scene ; whether Napoleon himself, 
left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his 
rock, " amid the melancholy main," presented to the re- 
flecting mind such a '' spectacle of pity and fear," as did 
this intrinsically nobler, gentler, and perhaps greater soul, 
wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle with base en- 
tanglements, which coiled closer and closer round him, 
till only death opened him an outlet. Conquerors are a 
race with whom the world could well dispense ; nor can 
the hard intellect, the unsympathizing loftiness, and high 
but selfish enthusiasm of such persons, inspire us in ge- 
neral with any affection; at best it may excite amaze- 
ment ; and their fall, like that of a pyramid, will be be- 
held with a certain sadness and awe. But a true Poet, a 
man in whose heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, 
some tone of the " Eternal Melodies," is the most precious 
gift that can be bestowed on a generation : we see in him 
a freer, purer, development of whatever is noblest in 
ourselves ; his life is a rich lesson to us, and we mourn 
his death, as that of a benefactor who loved and taught us. 
Such a gift had Nature in her bounty bestowed on us 
in Robert Burns; but with queenlike indifference she cast 
it from her hand, like a thing of no moment, and it was 
defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, before we 
recognised it. To the ill-starred Burns was given the 
power of making man's life more venerable, but that of 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 9 

wisely guiding his own was not given. Destiny, — for so 
in our ignorance we must speak, — his faults, the faults of 
others, proved too hard for him ; and that spirit, which 
might have soared, could it but have walked, soon sank 
to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the 
blossom, and died, we may almost say, without ever hav- 
ing lived. And so kind and warm a soul ; so full of in- 
born riches, of love to all living and lifeless things ! How 
his heart flows out in sympathy over universal nature ; 
and in her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a 
meaning! The "Daisy" falls ^ot unheeded under his 
ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of that " wee, cowering, 
timorous beastie," cast forth, after all its provident pains, 
to *' thole the sleety dribble, and cranreuch cauld." The 
" hoar visage" of Winter delights him : he dwells with a 
sad and oft-returning fondness in these scenes of solemn 
desolation ; but the voice of the tempest becomes an an- 
them to his ears; he loves to walk in the sounding woods, 
for " it raises his thoughts to Him tliat walketh on the 
tvings of the windP A true Poet-soul, for it needs but to 
be struck, and the sound it yields will be miisic ! But 
observe him chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. 
What warm, all-comprehending, fellow-feeling, what trust- 
ful, boundless love, what, generous exaggeration of the 
object loved ! His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, 
are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a queen, 
whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. The rough 
scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any Arcadian 
illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the smoke and 
soil of a too harsh reality, ai'e still lovely to him. Poverty 
is indeed his companion, but Love also, and Courage ; 
the simple feelings, the worth, the nobleness, that dwell 
under the straw roof, are dear and venerable to his heart : 



10 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

and thus over the lowest pro^ances of man's existence he 
pours the glory of his own soul; and they rise, in shadow 
and sunshine, softened and brightened into a beauty which 
other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just self- 
consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride ; 
yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for offence, no 
cold, suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one. The 
peasant Poet bears himself, we may say, like a King in 
exile : he is cast among the low, and feels himself equal 
to tj.-ie highest ; yet he claims no rank, that none may be 
disputed to him. The forward he can repel, the super- 
cilious he can subdue ; pretensions of wealth or ancestry 
are of no avail with him; there is a fire in that dark eye, 
under which the "insolence of condescension" cannot 
thrive. In his abasement, in his extreme need, he forgets 
not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood. 
And yet, far as he feels himself above common men, he 
wanders not apart from them, but mixes waiiiily in their 
interests; nay, throws himself into their arms; and, as it 
were, entreats them to love him. It is movins^ to see how, 
in his darkest despondency, this proud being still seeks 
relief from friendship ; unbosoms himself, often to the 
unworthy ; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a 
heart that knows only the name of friendship. And yet 
he was " quick to learn;" a man of keen vision, before 
whom common disguises afforded no concealment. His 
understanding saw through the hollo wness even of accom- 
plished deceivers ; but there was a generous credulity in 
his Heart. And so did our Peasant show himself among 
us ; "a soul like an .^olian harp, in whose strings the 
vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself 
intcv articulate melody." And this was he for whom the 
world found no fitter business than quaiTelling with 



CRITICAL ESSAY. ii 

smugglers 'nrifl vinfners, computing excise dues upon tal- 
low, and guaging ale barrels ! In such toils was that mighty 
Spirit sorrowfully wasted : and a hundred years may pass 
on, before another such is given us to waste. 

All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, 
seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor mu- 
tilated fraction of what was in him ; brief, broken glimpses 
of a genius that could never show itself complete ; that 
wanted all things for completeness : culture, leisure, true 
effort, nay, even length of life. His poems are, witii 
scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions, poured 
forth with little premeditation, expressing, by such means 
as offered, the passion, opinion, or humor of the hour. 
Never in one instance was it permitted him to grapple 
with any subject with the full collection of his strength, 
to fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of his genius. 
To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect fragments, 
would be at once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless, 
there is something in these poems, marred and defective 
as they are, which forbids the most fastidious student of 
poetry to pass them by. Some sort of enduring quality 
they must have ; for, after fifty years of the wildest vicis- 
situdes in poetic taste, they still continue to be read ; nay, 
are read more and more eagerly, more and more exten- 
sively ; and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that 
class upon whom transitory causes operate most strongly, 
but by all classes, down to the most hard, unlettered, and 
truly natural class, who read little, and especially no 
poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. The 
grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which ex- 
tends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and 
over all regions where the English tongue is spoken. 



12 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

are well worth inquiring into. After every just deduc- 
tion, it seems to imply some rare excellence in these 
works. What is that excellence 1 

To answer this question will not lead us far. The ex- 
cellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether 
in poetry or prose; but, at the same time, it is plain and 
easily recognised ; his Sincerity, his indisputable air of 
Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or joys ; no hollow 
fantastic sentimentalities ; no wiredrawn refinings, either 
in thought or feeling ; the passion that is traced before 
us has glowed in a living heart ; the opinion he utters has 
risen in his own understanding, and been ,a light to his 
own steps. He does not write from hearsay, but from 
sight and experience ; it is the scenes he has lived and 
labored amidst, that he describes : those scenes, rude and 
humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his 
soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves ; and he speaks 
forth what is in him, not from any outward call of vanity 
or interest, but because his heart is too full to be silent. 
He speaks it, too, with such melody and modulation as he 
can; "in homely rustic jingle;" but it is his own, and 
genuine. This is the grand secret for finding readers 
and retaining them : let him w^ho would move and con- 
vince others, be first moved and convinced himself Ho- 
race's rule. Si vis me flere, is applicable in a wider sense 
than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, we 
might say : Be true, if you would be believed. Let a 
man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, 
the emotion, the actual condition, of his own heart, and 
other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the 
tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In 
culture, in extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, 
or below him ; but in either case, his words, if they are 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 13 

earnest and sincere, will find some response witliin us; 
for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank, or 
inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of man 
to man. 

This may appear a very simple principle, and one which 
Bums had little merit in discovering. True, the discovery 
is easy enough : but the practical appliance is not easy ; 
is indeed the fundamental difficulty which all poets have 
to strive with, and which scarcely one in the hundred ever 
fairly surmounts. A head too dull to discriminate the true 
from the false ; a heart too dull to love the one at all risks, 
and to hate the other in spite of all temptations, are alike 
fatal to a writer. With either, or, as more commonly hap- 
pens, with both, of these deficiencies, combine a love of 
distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom wanting, 
and we have Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, 
its elder brother, is of morals. How often does the one 
and the other front us, in poetry, as in life ! Great poets 
;mselves are not always free of this vice ; nay, it is pre- 
ely on a certain sort and degree of greatness that it is 
DSt commonly ingrafted. A strong effort after excel- 
nce will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow of 
iccess, and he who has much to unfold, will sometimes 
nfold it imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no com- 
;ion man : yet if we examine his poetry with this view, 
we shall find it far enough from faultless. Generally 
speaking, we should say that it is not true. He refreshes 
us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar 
strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon 
ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds and 
Giaours, we would ask, real men, we mean, poetically 
consistent and conceivable men 1 Do not these charac- 
ters, does not the character of their author, which more 
2 



14 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put 
on for the occasion ; no natural or possible mode of being, 
but something intended to look much grander than nature 1 
Surely, all these stormfal agonies, this volcanic heroism, 
superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so 
much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous 
humors, is more like the brawling of a player in some 
paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bear- 
ing of a man in the business of life, which is to last three 
score and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of 
this sort, something which we should call theatrical, false, 
and affected, in every one of these otherwise powerful 
pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, especially the latter parts of 
it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere work, he ever 
wrote ; the only work where he showed himself, in any 
measure, as he was ; and seemed so intent on his subject 
as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet Byron hated this 
vice ; we believe, heartily detested it : nay, he had de- 
clared formal war against it in words. So difficult is it 
even for the strongest to make this primary attainment, 
which might seem the simplest of all : to read its own con- 
sciousness wiiliout mistakes, without errors involuntary or 
wilful ! We recollect no poet of Burns's susceptibility 
who comes before us from the first, and abides with us to 
the last, with such a total want of affectation. He is an 
honest man, and an honest writer. In his successes and 
his failures, in his greatness and his littleness, he is ever 
clear, simple, true, and glitters with no lustre but his own. 
We reckon this to be a great virtue ; to be, in fact, the 
root of most other virtues, literary as well as moral. 

It is necessary, however, to mention, that it is to the 
poetry of Burns that we now allude ; to those writings 
which he had time to meditate, and where no special 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 15 

reason existed to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his 
endeavor to fulfil it. Certain of his Letters, and other 
fractions of prose composition, by no means deserve this 
praise. Here, doubtless, there is not the same natural 
truth of style ; but on the contrary, something not only 
stiff, but strained and twisted ; a certain, high-flown in- 
flated tone ; the stilting emphasis of which contrasts ill 
with the firmness and rugged simplicity of even his poor- 
est verses. Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether 
unaffected. Does not Shakspeare himself sometimes pre- 
meditate the sheerest bombast ! But even with regard 
to these Letters of Burns, it is but fair to state that he 
had two excuses. The first was his comparative deficiency 
in language. Bums, though for most part he vmtes with 
singular force, and even gracefulness, is not master of 
English prose, as he is of Scottish verse ; not master of 
it, we mean, in proportion to the depth and vehemence of 
his matter. These Letters strike us as the effort of a man 
to express something which he has no organ fit for ex- 
pressing. But a second and weightier excuse is to be 
found in the peculiarity of Bums's social rank. His cor- 
respondents are often men whose relation to him he has 
never accurately ascertained ; whom therefore he is either 
forearming himself against, or else unconsciously flatter- 
ing, by adopting the style he thinks will please them. At 
all events, we should remember that these faults, even in 
his Letters, are not the rule, but the exception. When- 
ever he writes, as one would ever wish to do, to trusted 
friends and on real interests, his style becomes simple, 
vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. His Let- 
ters to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excellent. 

But we return to his poetry. In addition to its sin- 
cerity, it has another peculiar merit, which indeed is but 



16 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

a mode, or perhaps a means, of the foregoing. It dis- 
plays itself in his choice of subjects, or rather in his indif- 
ference as to subjects, and the power he has of making 
all subjects interesting. The ordinary poet, like the ordi- 
nary man, is for ever seeking in external circumstances 
the help which can be found only in himself. In what is 
familiar and near at hand, he discerns no form or comeli- 
ness : home is not poetical but prosaic ; it is in some 
past, distant, conventional world, that poetry resides for 
him ; were he there and not here', were he thus and not 
so, it would be well with him. Hence our innumerable 
host of rose-colored novels and iron-mailed epics, with 
their locality not on the Earth, but somewhere nearer to 
the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and our 
Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, and 
copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, and so many other 
truculent figures from the heroic times or the heroic cli- 
mates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be 
with them ! But yet, as a great moralist proposed preach- 
ing to the men of this century, so would we fain preach 
to the poets, *' a sermon on the duty of staying at home." 
Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can 
do little for them. That form of life has attraction for us, 
less because it is better or nobler than our own, than sim- 
ply because it is different ; and even this attraction must 
be of the most transient sort. For will not our own age, 
one day, be an ancient one ; and have as quaint a costume 
as the rest ; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but 
ranked along with them, in respect of quaintness ? Does 
Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what passed 
o,ut of his native Greece, and two centuries before he was 
bom ; or because he wrote of what passed in God's world, 
and in the heart of man, which is the same after, thirty 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 17 

centuries 1 Let our poets look to this : is their feehng 
really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that of 
other men, who have nothing to fear, even from the hum- 
blest subject ; is it not so, — they have nothing to hope, 
but an ephemeral favor, even from the highest. 

The poet, we cannot but think, can never have far to 
seek for a subject: the elements of his art are in him, and 
around him on every hand ; for him the Ideal world is 
not remote from the Actual, but under it and within it : 
nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can discern it 
there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world 
around him, the poet is in his place ; for here too is man's 
existence, with its infinite longings and small acquirings ; 
its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavors; its unspeak- 
able aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through 
Eternity: and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom 
that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man 
first began to live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy 
in every death-bed, though it were a peasant's and a bed 
of heath] And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that 
there can be Comedy no longer 1 Or are men suddenly 
grown wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, 
but be cheated of his Farce 1 Man's life and nature is, as 
it was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an 
eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them; 
or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is 
a rates, a seer; a gift of vision has been given him. Has 
life no meanings for him, which another cannot equally 
decipher ] then he is no poet, and Del23hi itself will not 
make him one. 

In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a 

great poet, better manifests his capability, better proves 

the truth of his genius, than if he had, by his own strength, 

kept the whole Minerva Press going, to the end of his 

2* 



18 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

literary course. He shows himself at least a poet of Na- 
ture's own making ; and Nature, after all, is still the grand 
agent in making poets. We often hear of this and the 
other external condition being requisite for the existence 
of a poet. Sometimes it is a certain sort of training ; he 
must have studied certain things, studied for instance " the 
elder dramatists," and so learned a poetic language ; as if 
poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At other times 
we are told, he must be bred in a certain rank, and must 
be on a confidential footing with the higher classes ; be- 
cause, above all other things, he must see the world. As 
to seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause him 
little difficulty, if he have but an eye to see it with. 
Without eyes, indeed, the task might be hard. But hap- 
pily every poet is born in the world, and sees it, with or 
against his will, every day and every hour he lives. The 
mysterious workmanship of man's heart, the true light 
and the inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal 
themselves not only in capital cities, and crowded saloons, 
but in every hut and hamlet where men have their abode. 
Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues, and all 
human vices ; the passions at once of a Borgia and of a 
Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter lines, in the 
consciousness of every individual bosom, that has prac- 
tised honest self-examination 1 Truly, this same world 
may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, 
as clearly as it ever came to light in Crockford's, or the 
Tuileries itself 

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the 
poor aspirant to poetry ; for it is hinted that he should 
have bee7i horn two centuries ago ; inasmuch as poetry, 
soon after that date, vanished from the earth, and became 
no longer attainable by men !. Such cobweb speculations. 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 19 

have, now and then, overhung the field of literature ; but 
they obstruct not the growth of any plant there : the 
Shakspeare or the Burns, unconsciously, and merely as 
he walks onward, silently brushes them away. Is not 
every genius an impossibility till he appear 1 Why do 
we call him new and original, i£ ive saw where his marble 
was lying, and what fabric he could rear from it ] It is 
not the material but the workman that is wanting. It is 
not the dark place that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scot- 
tish peasant's life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, 
till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it ; found it 
a marCs life, and therefore significant to men. A thousand 
battle-fields remain unsung ; but the Wounded Hare \id^^ 
not perished without its memorial ; a balm of mercy yet 
breathes on us from its dumb agonies, because a poet was 
there. Our Halloiveen had passed and repassed, in rude 
awe and laughter, since the era of the Druids ; but no 
Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the materials of a 
Scottish Idyl ; neither was the Holy Fair any Council of 
Trent, or Roman Jubilee ; but nevertheless. Superstition, 
and Hypoc7'isy, and Fun having been propitious to him, 
in this man's hand it became a poem, instinct with satire, 
and genuine comic life. Let but the true poet be given 
us, we repeat it, place him where and how you will, and 
true poetry will not be wanting. 

Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as 
we have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged 
sterling worth pervades whatever Burns has written :. a 
virtue, as of green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in 
his poetry ; it is redolent of natural life, and hardy natu- 
ral men. There is a decisive strength in him ; and yet a 
sweet native gracefulness : he is tender, and he is vehe- 
ment, yet without constraint or too visible effort; he 



20 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

melts the heart, or inflames it, with a power which seems 
habitual and familiar to him. We see in him the gentle- 
ness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep earn- 
estness, the force and passionate ardor of a hero. Tears 
lie in him, and consuming fire ; as lightning lurks in the 
drops of a summer cloud. He has a resonance in his 
bosom for every note of human feeling ; the high and the 
low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in 
their turns to his "lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit." 
And observe with what a prompt and eager force he 
grasps his subject, be it what it may ! How he fixes, as it 
were, the full image of the matter in his eye ; fall and 
clear in every lineament ; and catches the real type and 
essence of it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial 
circumstances, no one of which misleads him ! Is it of 
reason ; some truth to be discovered 1 No sophistry, no 
vain surface-logic detains him ; quick, resolute, unerring, 
he pierces through into the maiTow of the question ; and 
speaks his verdict with an emphasis that cannot be for- 
gotten. Is it of description ; some visual object to be re- 
presented 1 ^ No poet of any age or nation is more graphic 
than Burns: the characteristic features disclose themselves 
to him at a glance ; three lines from his hand, and we have 
a likeness. And, in that rough dialect, in that rude, often 
awkward, metre, so clear, and definite a likeness ! It 
seems a draughtsman working with a burnt stick ; and 
yet the burin of a Retsch is not more expressive or exact. 
This clearness of sight we may call the foundation of 
all talent ; for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall 
we know how to place or prize it, in our understanding, 
our imagination, our affections 1 Yet it is not in itself 
perhaps a very high excellence ; but capable of being 
united indifferently with the strongest, or with ordinary 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 21 

powers. Homer surpasses all men in this quality : But 
strangely enough, at no great distance below him are 
Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, in truth, to what is 
called a lively mind ; and gives no sure indication of the 
higher endowments that may exist along with it. In all 
the three cases we have mentioned, it is combined with 
gi'eat garrulity ; their descriptions are detailed, ample, 
and lovingly exact ; Homer's fire bursts through, from 
time to time, as if by accident ; but Defoe and Richard- 
son have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distinguished 
by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his con- 
ceptions. Of the strength, the piercing emphasis with 
which he thought, his emphasis of expression may give a 
humble but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered sharper 
sayings than his ; words more memorable, now by their 
burning vehemence, now by their cool vigor and laconic 
pith 1 A single phrase depicts a whole subject, a whole 
scene. Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field strug- 
gled forward, he says, " red-ivat shod ;" giving, in this one 
word, a full vision of hoiTor and carnage, perhaps too 
frightfully accurate for Art ! 

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Bums 
is this vigor of his strictly intellectual perceptions. A 
resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, as in his 
feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says of him, 
with some surprise : " All the faculties of Burns's mind 
were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous ; and his 
predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own 
enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius ex- 
clusively adapted to that species of composition. From 
his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted 
to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to 
exert his abilities." But this, if we mistake not, is at all 



22 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

times the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. / 
Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the 
whole consists in extreme sensibility, and a certain vague 
pervading tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty, 
110 organ which can be superadded to the rest, or disjoined 
from them ; but rather the result of their general har- 
mony and completion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist 
in~ the Poet, are those that exist, with more or less de- 
velopment, in every human soul : the imagination which 
shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the same faculty, weaker 
in degree, which called that picture into being. How 
does the poet speak to all men, with power, but by being 
still more a man than they 1 Shakspeare, it has been 
well observed, in the j)lanning and completing of his tra- 
gedies, has shown an Understanding, were it nothing 
more, which might have governed states, or indited a 
Novum Orga?mm. What Bums's force of understanding 
may have been, we have less means of judging : for it 
dwelt among the humblest objects, never saw philosophy, 
and never rose, except for short intervals, into the region 
of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient indication re- 
mains for us in his works : we discern the brawny move- 
ments of a gigantic though untutored strength, and can 
understand how, in conversation, his quick sure insight into 
men and things may, as much as aught else about him, 
have amazed the best thinkers of his time and country. 

But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns 
is fine as well as strong. The more delicate relations of 
things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were 
intimately present to his heart. The logic of the senate 
and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient ; nay, 
perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the most cer- 
tainly elude it. For this logic works by words, and " the 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 23 

highest," it has been said, ** cannot be expressed in words." 
We are not without tokens of an openness for this higher 
truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for it, 
having existed in Bums. Mr. Stewart, it will be remem- 
bered, " wonders," in the passage above quoted, that 
Burns had formed some distinct conception of the " doc- 
trine of association." We rather think that far subtler 
things than the doctrine of association had from of old 
been familiar to him. Here for instance : 

" We know nothing," thus writes he, " or next to nothing, of the 
structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seeming ca- 
prices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, 
or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no ex- 
traordinary impression, I have some favorite flowers in spring, 
among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the 
wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I 
view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud 
solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing 
cadence of a troop of grey plover in an autumnal morning, without 
feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. 
Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing *? Are we a piece 
of machinery, which, like the ^olian harp, passive, takes the im- 
pression of the passing accident ; or do these workings argue some- 
thing within us above the trodden clod 1 I own myself partial to 
such proofs of those awful and important realities : a God that made 
all things, man's immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of 
weal or wo beyond death and the grave." 

Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken 
of as something different from general force and fineness 
of nature, as something partly independent of them. 
The necessities of language probably require this ; but 
in truth these qualities are not distinct and independent : 
except in special cases, and from special causes, they ever 
go together. A man of strong understanding is generally 
a man of strong character : neither is delicacy in the one 
kind often divided from delicacy in the other. No one, 
at all events, is ignorant that in the poetry of Burns, keen- 



24 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

ness of insight keeps pace with keenness of feeling ; that 
his light is not more pervading than his warmth. He is 
a man of the most impassioned temper ; with passions not 
strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which great vir- 
tues and great poems take their rise. It is reverence, it 
is Love towards all Nature that inspires him, that opens 
his eyes to its beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent 
in its praise. There is a true old saying, that " love fur- 
thers knowledge ;" but above all, it is the living essence 
of that knowledge which makes poets ; the first principle 
of its existence, increase, activity. Of Burns's fervid af- 
fection, his generous all-embracing Love, we have spoken 
already, as of the grand distinction of his nature, seen 
equally in word and deed, in his Life and in his Writings. 
It were easy to multiply examples. Not man only, but 
all that environs man in the material and moral universe 
is lovely in his sight : " the hoary hawthorn," the " troop 
of grey plover," the " solitary curlew," all are dear to 
him ; all live in this Earth along with him, and to all he 
is knit as in mysterious brotherhood. How touching is 
it, for instance, that amidst the gloom of personal misery, 
brooding over the wintry desolation without him and within 
him, he thinks of the " ourie cattle" and "silly sheep," 
and their sufferings in the pitiless storm ! 

" I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war ; 
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 
Beneath a scaur. 

Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 
That in the merry months o' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee % 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 

And close thy ee ? " 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 25 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its " ragged roof and 
chinky wall," has a heart to pity even these ! This is 
worth several homilies on Mercy : for it is the voice of 
Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy ; his 
soul rushes forth into all realms of being ; nothing that 
has existence can be indifferent to him. The very Devil 
he cannot hate with right orthodoxy ! 

" But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben; 
O wad you tak a thought and men' ! 
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — 

Still hae a stake ; 
I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Even for your sake! " 

He did not know, probably, that Sterne had been before- 
hand with him. " He is the father of curses and lies," 
said Dr. Slop; "and is cursed and damned already." — 
" I am sorry for it," quoth my uncle Toby ! — *'A poet 
without Love, were a physical and metaphysical impossi- 
bility." 

Why should we speak of Scots, wlia hae ivV Wallace 
hied ; since all know it, from the king to the meanest of 
his subjects \ This dithyrambic was composed on horse- 
back ; in riding in the middle of tempests, over the wildest 
Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, ob- 
serving the poet's looks, forbore to speak, — judiciously 
enough, — for a man composing 'Bruce' s Address xm^l be 
unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was sing- 
ing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns : 
but to the external ear, it should be sung with the throat 
of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood in the 
heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills 
under this war-ode, the best, we believe, that was ever 
written by any pen. 
3 



26 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

Another wild stormful song, that dwells in our ear and 
mind with a strange tenacity, is Macpherson' s Farewell. 
Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself that co- 
operates. For was not this grim Celt, this shaggy North- 
land Cacus, that " lived a life of sturt and strife, and died 
by treacherie," was not he too one of the Nimrods and 
Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own remote 
misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one ] Nay, 
was there not a touch of grace given him '? A fibre of 
love and softness, of poetry itself, must have lived in his 
savage heart ; for he composed that air the night before 
his execution ; on the wings of that poor melody, his bet- 
ter soul would soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the 
ignominy and despair, which, like an avalanche, was hurl- 
ing him to the abyss ! Here also, as at Thebes, and in 
Pelops' line, was material Fate matched against man's 
Free-will ; matched in bitterest though obscure duel ; 
and the ethereal soul sunk not, even in its blindness, with- 
out a cry which has survived it. But who, except Burns, 
could have given words to such a soul; words that we 
never listen to without a strange half-barbarous, half- 
poetic fellow-feeling ] 

^ '• Sae rantingly sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he ; 
He played a spring, and danced it round, 
Beloio the galloios tree.'' 

Under a lighter and thinner disguise, the same princi- 
ple of Love, which w^e have recognised as the great cha- 
racteristic of Bums, and of all true poets, occasionally 
manifests itself in the shape of Humor. Everywhere, in- 
deed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth 
rolls through the mind of Burns ; he rises to the high, and 
stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to all 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 27 

Nature. We speak not of his bold and often irresistible 
faculty of caricature ; for this is Drollery rather than Hu- 
mor : but a much tenderer sportfulness dwells in him ; 
and comes forth here and there, in evanescent and beau- 
tiful touches ; as in his Address to the Mouse, or the Far- 
mer's Mare, or in his Elegy on Poar Mailie, which last 
may be reckoned his happiest effort of this kind. In 
these pieces, there are traits of a Humor as fine as that 
of Sterne ; yet altogether different, original, peculiar, — 
the Humor of Bums. 

Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other 
kindred qualities of Burns's poetry, much more might be 
said ; but now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we 
must prepare to quit this part of our subject. To speak 
of his individual writings, adequately, and with any de- 
tail, would lead us far beyond our limits. As already 
hinted, we can look on but few of these pieces as, in 
strict critical language, deserving the name of Poems ; 
they are rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed 
sense ; yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. 
Tam d* Chanter itself, which enjoys so high a favor, does 
not appear to us, at all decisively, to come under this last 
category. It is not so much a poem, as a piece of spark- 
ling rhetoric ; the heart and body of the story still lies 
hard and dead. He has not gone back, much less car- 
ried us back, into that dark, earnest, wondering age, when 
the tradition was believed, and when it took its rise ; he 
does not attempt, by any new modelling of his supernatu- 
ral ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of 
human nature, which once responded to such things; and 
which lives in us too, and will for ever live, though silent, 
or vibrating with far other notes, and to far different 
issues. Our German readers will understand us, when we 



28 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

say, that he is not the Tieck but the Musaus of this tale. 
Externally it is all green and living ; yet look closer, it is 
no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. The piece does 
not properly cohere ; the strange chasm which yawns in 
our incredulous imaginations between the Ayr public- 
house and the gate of Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, 
nay, the idea of such a bridge is laughed at ; and thus the 
Tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere drunken phan- 
tasmagoria, painted on ale-vapors, and the farce alone 
has any reality. We do not say that Burns should have 
made much more of this tradition ; we rather think that, 
for strictly poetical purposes, not much was to be made of 
it. Neither are we blind to the deep, varied, genial power 
displayed in what he has actually accomplished ; but we 
find far more " Shakspearian" qualities, as these of Tarn 
& S?ianter have been fondly named, in many of his other 
pieces ; nay, we incline to believe, that this latter might 
have been vrritten, all but quite as well, by a man who, in 
place of genius, had only possessed talent. 

Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly 
poetical of all his ** poems" is one, which does not appear 
in Currie's Edition ; but has been often printed before 
and since, under the humble title of The Jolly Beggars. 
The subject truly is among the lowest in nature ; but it 
only the more shows our poet's gift in raising it into the 
domain of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly 
compacted ; melted together, refined ; and poured forth 
in one flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, and 
soft of movement ; yet sharp and precise in its details ; 
every face is a portrait : that raucle carlin, that wee Apollo^ 
that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet ideal ; the scene is at 
once a dream, and the very Rag-castle of " Poosy-Nansie." 
Farther, it seems in a considerable degree complete, a 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 29 

real self-supporting "Whole, which is the highest merit in 
a poem. The blanket of the night is drawn asunder for 
a moment ; in full, ruddy, and flaming light, these rough 
tatterdemalions are seen in their boisterous revel ; for the 
strong pulse of Life vindicates its right to gladness even 
here ; and when the curtain closes, we prolong the action 
without effort ; the next day as the last, our Caird and 
our Balladmonger are singing and soldiering ; their "brats 
and callets" are hawking, begging, cheating ; and some 
other night, in new combinations, they will wring from 
Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer. It would 
be strano^e, doubtless, to call this the best of Burns's wri- 
tings : we mean to say only, that it seems to us the most 
perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, 
.strictly so called. In the Beggar's Opera, in the B.eggar^s 
Bush, as other critics have already remarked, there is 
nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals this Cantata ; 
nothing, as we think, which comes within many degrees 
of it. 

But by far the most finished, complete, and truly in- 
spired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be found 
among his Songs. It is here that, although through a 
small aperture, his light shines with the least obstruction ; 
in its highest beauty, and pure sunny clearness. The 
reason may be, that Song is a brief and simple species of 
composition ; and requires nothing so much for its per- 
fection, as genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. 
The Song has its rules equally with the Tragedy ; rules 
which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are 
not so much as felt. We might write a long essay on the 
Songs of Burns ; which we reckon by far the best that 
Britain has yet produced : for, indeed, since the era of 
Queen Elizabeth, we know not that, by any other hand, 
3* 



30 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

aught truly worth attention has been accomplished in this 
department. True, we have songs enough *' by persons 
of quality ;" we have tawdry, hollow, wine-bred, madri- 
gals ; many a rhymed " speech" in the flowing and watery 
vein of Ossorius the Portugal Bishop, rich in sonorous 
words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps with some tint of a 
sentimental sensuality ; all which many persons cease not 
from endeavoring to sing : though for most part, we fear, 
the music is but from the throat outwards, or at best from 
some region far enough short of the Soul ; not in which, 
but in a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in 
some vaporous debateable land on the outside of the Ner- 
vous System, most of such madrigals and rhymed speeches 
seem to have originated. With the Songs of Burns we 
must not name these things. Independently of the clear, 
manly, he3,rtfelt sentiment that ever pervades Ms poetry, 
his Songs are honest in another point of view : in form, 
as well as in spirit. They do not affect to be set to music, 
but they actually and in themselves are music ; they have 
received their hfe, and fashioned themselves together, in 
the medium of Harmony, as Venus rose from the bosom 
of the sea. \ The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but 
suggested ; not said, or spouted, in rhetorical complete- 
ness and coherence ; but sung, in fitful gushes, in glow- 
ing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warhlings not of the voice 
only, but of the whole mind. We consider this to be the 
essence of a song ; and that no songs since the little care- 
less catches, and, as it were, drops of song, which Shak- 
speare has here and there sprinkled over his plays, fulfil 
this condition in nearly the same degree as most of Burns's 
do. Such grace and truth of external movement, too, 
presupposes in general a corresponding force and truth 
of sentiment, and inward meaning. The Songs of Burns 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 31 

are not more perfect in the former quality, than in the 
latter. With what tendeniess he sings, yet with what : 
vehemence and entireness ! There is a pieixing wail in ; 
his sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy ; he buras with 
the sternest ire, or laughs with the loudest or slyest mirth; 
and yet he is sweet and soft, " sweet as the smile when 
fond lovers meet, and soft as their parting tear !" If we 
farther take into account the immense variety of his sub- 
jects ; how, from the loud flowing revel in Willie hrezv'd 
a peek d Maui, to the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness for 
Mary in Heaven ; from the glad kind greeting of Auld. 
Langsyne, or the comic archness of Duncan Gray, to the 
fire-eyed fury of Scots, wlia hae wi' Wallace hied, he has 
found a tone and words for every mood of man's heart, — 
it will seem a small praise if we rank him as the first of 
all our song- writers ; for we know not where to find one 
worthy of being second to him. 

It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief 
influence as an author will ultimately be found to depend ; 
nor, if our Fletcher's aphorism is true, shall we account 
this a small influence. *' Let me make the songs of a peo- 
ple," said he, " and you shall make its laws." Surely, if 
ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Legisla- 
tors, on this ground, it was Burns. His songs are already 
part of the mother tongue, not of Scotland only but of 
Britain, and of the millions that in all the ends of the 
earth speak a British language. In hut and hall, as the 
heart unfolds itself in the joy and wo of existence, the 
name, the voice of that joy and that wo, is the name and 
voice which Bums has given them. Strictly speaking, 
perhaps, no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts 
and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and alto- 
gether private individual, with means, apparently the 
humblest. 



32 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think 
that Burns's influence may have been considerable : we 
mean, as exerted specially on the Literature of his coun- 
try, at least on the Literature of Scotland. Among the 
great changes which British, particularly Scottish litera- 
ture, has undergone since that period, one of the greatest 
wdll be found to consist in its remarkable increase of na- 
tionality. Even the English writers, most popular in 
Burns's time, were little distinguished for their literary 
patriotism, in this its best sense. A certain attenuated 
cosmopolitanism had, in good measure, taken place of the 
old insular home-feeling ; literature was, as it were, with- 
out any local environment ; was not nourished by the 
affections which spring from a native soil. Our Grays 
and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo ; the 
thing written bears no mark of place ; it is not written so 
much for Englishmen, as for men ; or rather, which is 
the inevitable result of this, for certain Generalizations 
which philosophy termed men. Goldsmith is an ex- 
ception : not so Johnson ; the scene of his Ravihler is 
little more English than that of his Rasselas. But if such 
was, in some degree, the case with England, it was, in 
the highest degree, the case with Scotland. In fact, our 
Scottish literature had, at that pei'iod, a very singular as- 
pect; unexampled, so far as we know, except perhaps at 
Geneva, where the same state of matters appears still to 
continue. For a long period after Scotland became Bri- 
tish, we had no literature : at the date when Addison and 
Steele were writing their Sjyectators, our good John Bos- 
ton was writing, with the noblest intent, but alike in de- 
fiance of grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold State of 
Man. Then came the schisms in our National Church, 
and the fiercer schisms in our Body Politic : Theologic 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 33 

ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both cases, 
seemed to have blotted out the intellect of the country ; 
however, it was only obscured, not obliterated. Lord 
Kames made nearly the first attempt, and a tolerably 
clumsy one, at writing English ; and ere long, Hume, 
Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted 
hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet in this brilliant 
resuscitation of our " fervid genius," there was nothing 
truly Scottish, nothing indigenous ; except, perhaps, the 
natural impetuosity of intellect, which we sometimes 
claim, and are sometimes upbraided with, as a character- 
istic of our nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, 
so full of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any 
English ; our culture was almost exclusively French. It 
was by studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, 
that Kames had trained himself to be a critic and philoso- 
pher : it was the light of Montesquieu and Mably that 
guided Robertson in his political speculations ; Quesnay's 
lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was 
too rich a man to borrow ; and perhaps he reacted on the 
French more than he was acted on by them : but neither 
had he aught to do with Scotland ; Edinburgh, equally 
with La Fleche, was but the lodging and laboratory, in 
which he not so much morally lived, as metaphysically 
investigated. Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers, 
so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all 
appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay, of any human 
affection whatever. The French wits of the period were 
as unpatriotic : but their general deficiency in moral prin- 
ciple, not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in 
all virtue, strictly so called, render this accountable 
enough. We hope, there is a patriotism founded on 
something better than prejudice ; that our country may 



34 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

be dear to us, without injury to our philosophy ; that 
in loving and justly prizing all other lands, we may prize 
justly, and yet love before all others, our own stem Mo- 
therland, and the venerable structure of social and moral 
Life, which Mind has through long ages been building up 
for us there. Surely there is nourishment for the better 
part of man's heart in all this : surely the roots, that have 
fixed themselves in the very core of man's being, may be 
so cultivated as to grow up not into briers, but into roses, 
in the field of his life ! Our Scottish sages have no such 
propensities : the field of their life shows neither briers 
nor roses ; but only a flat, continuous thrashing floor for 
Logic, whereon all questions, from the " Doctrine of 
Rent," to the "Natural History of Religion," are thrashed 
and sifted with the same mechanical impartiality ! 

With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, it 
cannot be denied that much of this evil is past, or rapidly 
passing away : our chief literary men, whatever other 
faults they may have, no longer live among us like a 
French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Missiona- 
ries ; but like natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking 
and sympathizing in all our attachments, humors, and 
habits. Our literature no longer grows in water, but in 
mould, and with the true racy virtues of the soil and cli- 
mate. How much of this change may be due to Burns, 
or to any other individual, it might be difiicult to estimate. 
Direct literary imitation of Burns was not to be looked 
for. But his example, in the fearless adoption of domes- 
tic subjects, could not but operate from afar ; and cer- 
tainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn with 
a warmer glow than in that of Burns : " a tide of Scot- 
tish prejudice," as he modestly calls this deep and gene- 
rous feeling, *' had been poured along his veins ; and he 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 35 

felt that it would boil there till the floodgates shut in eter- 
nal rest." It seemed to him, as if Ae could do so little for 
his country, and yet would so gladly have done all. One 
small province stood open for him ; that of Scottish song, 
and how eagerly he entered on it ; how devotedly he la- 
bored there ! In his most toilsome journeyings, this object 
never quits him ; it is the little happy-valley of his care- 
worn heart. In the gloom of his own afiliction, he eagerly 
searches after some lonely brother of the muse, and re- 
joices to snatch one other name from the oblivion that was 
covering it ! These were early feelings, and they abode 
with him to the end. 

" a wish, (I mind its power,) 

A wish, that to my latest hour 
Will strongly heave my breast ; 
That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
Some useful plan or book could make, 
Or sing a sang at least. 
The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 
> Amang the bearded bear, 

I turn'd my weeding-clips aside, 
And spared the symbol dear." 

But to leave the mere literaiy character of Burns, whioti 
has already detained us too long, we cannot but thit' 
that the Life he willed, and was fated to lead among hj 
fellow men, is both more interesting and instructive than 
any of his written works. These Poems are but like little 
rhymed fragments scattered here and there in the grand 
unrhymed Romance Of his earthly existence ; and it is 
only when intercalated in this at their proper places, that 
they attain their full measure of significance. And this 
too, alas, was but a fragment ! The plan of a mighty 
edifice had been sketched ; some columns, porticoes, firm 
masses of building, stand completed ; the rest more or 



36 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

less clearly indicated ; with many a far-stretching tenden- 
cy, which only studious and friendly eyes can now trace 
towards the purposed termination. For the work is bro- 
ken off in the middle, almost in the beginning ; and rises 
among us, beautiful and sad, at once unfinished and a 
ruin ! If charitable judgment was necessary in estimating 
his poems, and justice required that the aim and the mani- 
fest power to fulfil it must often be accepted for the fulfil- 
ment ; much more is this the case in regard to his life, 
the sum and result of all his endeavors, where his diffi- 
culties came upon him not in detail only, but in mass ; 
and so much has been left unaccomplished, nay, was 
mistaken, and altogether marred. 

Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of 
Burns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and 
manhood; but only youth : for, to the end, we discern 
no' decisive change in the complexion of his character ; 
in his thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were, in youth. 
With all that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating 
insight, and singular maturity of intellectual power, ex- 
hibited in his writings, he never attains to any clearness 
regarding himself; to the last, he never ascertains his pe- 
culiar aim, even with such distinctness as is common 
among ordinary men ; and therefore never can pursue it 
with that singleness of will, which insures success and 
some contentment to such men. To the last, he wavers 
between two purposes : glorying in his talent, like a true 
poet, he yet cannot consent to make this his chief and sole 
glory, and to follow it as the one thing needful, through 
poverty or riches, through good or evil report. Another 
far meaner ambition still cleaves to him ; he must dream 
and struggle about a certain " Rock of Independence ;" 
which, natural and even admirable as it might be, was still 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 37 

but a warring with the world, on the comparatively insig- 
nificant ground of his being more or less completely sup- 
plied with money, than others ; of his standing at a higher, 
or at a lower altitude in general estimation, than others. 
For the world still appears to him, as to the young, in 
borrowed colors : he expects from it what it cannot give 
to any man ; seeks for contentment, not within himself, 
in action and wise effort, but from without, in the kind- 
ness of circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, pecu- 
niary ease. He would be happy, not actively and in him- 
self, but passively, and from some ideal cornucopia of 
Enjoyments, not earned by his own labor, but showered 
on him by the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, like a 
young man, he cannot steady himself for any fixed or sys- 
tematic pursuit, but, swerves to and fro, between passion- 
ate hope, and remorseful disappointment : rushing on- 
wards with a deep tempestuous force, he surmounts or 
breaks asunder many a barrier ; travels, nay, advances far, 
but advancing only under imcertain guidance, is ever and 
anon turned from his path ; and to the last, cannot reach 
the only true happiness of a man, that of clear, decided 
Activity in the sphere for which, by nature and circum- 
stances, he has been fitted and appointed. 

We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns : nay, 
perhaps, they but interest us the more in his favor. This 
blessing is not given soonest to the best ; but rather, it is 
often the greatest minds that are latest in obtaining it ; 
for where most is to be developed, most time may be re- 
quired to develop it. A complex condition had been 
assigned him from without, as complex a condition from 
within : no "pre-established harmony" existed between the 
clay soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert 
Bums ; it was not wonderful, therefore, that the adjust- 
4 



38 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

ment between them should have been long postponed, and 
his arm long cmnbered, and his sight confused, in so vast 
and discordant an economy, as he had been appointed 
steward over. Byron was, at his death, but a year younger 
than Burns ; and through life, as it might have appeared, 
far more simply situated : yet in him too, we can trace 
no such adjustment, no such moral manhood ; but at best, 
and only a little before his end, the beginning of what 
seemed such. 

By much the most striking incident in Burns's Life is 
his journey to Edinburgh; but perhaps a still more im- 
portant one, is his residence at Irvine, so early as in his 
twenty-third year. Hitherto his life had been poor and 
toil-worn ; but otherwise not un genial, and, with all its 
distresses, by no means unhappy. In his parentage, de- 
ducting outward circumstances, he had every reason to 
reckon himself fortunate : his father was a man of thought- 
ful, intense, earnest, character, as the best of our peasants 
are ; valuing knowledge, possessing some, and, what is 
far better and rarer, open-minded for more ; a man with 
a keen insight, and devout heart : reverent towards God, 
friendly therefore at once, and fearless towards all that 
God has made ; in one word, though but a hard-handed 
peasant, a complete and fully unfolded 3Ian. Such a 
father is seldom found in any rank in society ; and was 
worth descending far in society to seek. Unfortunately, 
he was very poor ; had he been even a little richer, almost 
ever so little, the whole might have issued far otherwise. 
Mighty events turn on a straw ; the crossing of a brook 
decides the conquest of the world. Had this William 
Burns's small seven acres of nursery ground anywise pros- 
pered, the boy Robert had been sent to school ; had 
struggled forward, as so many weaker men do, to some 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 39 

university ; come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a 
regular well-trained intellectual workman, and changed 
the whole of the course of British Literature, — for it lay 
in him to have done this ! But the nursery did not pros- 
per ; poverty sank his whole family below the help of 
even our cheap school-system : Burns remained a hard- 
worked plough-boy, and British literature took its own 
course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged scene, there is 
much to nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his broth- 
er, and for his father and mother, whom he loves, and 
would fain shield from want. Wisdom is not banished 
from their poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling : 
the solemn words, Let us worship God, are heard there 
from a "priest-like father;" if threatenings of unjust men 
throw mother and Qhildren into tears, these are tears not 
of grief only, but of holiest affection ; every heart in that 
humble gi'oup feels itself the closer knit to every other ; in 
their hard warfare they are there together, a " little band 
of brethren." Neither are such tears, and the deep beauty 
that dwells in them, their only portion. Light visits the 
hearts as it does the eyes of all living : there is a force, 
too, in this youth, that enables him to trample on misfor- 
tune ; nay, to bind it under his feet to make him sport' 
For a bold, warm, buoyant humor of character has been 
given him ; and so the thick-coming shapes of evil are 
welcomed with a gay, friendly irony, and in their closest 
pressure he bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague yearn- 
ings of ambition fail not, as he grows up ; dreamy fancies 
hang like cloud-cities around him ; the curtain of Exist- 
ence is slowly rising, in many-colored splendor and gloom : 
and the auroral light of first love is gilding his horizon, 
and the music of song is on his path ; and so he walks 



in glory and in joy, 



Bebin4 his plough, upon the mountain side ! 



40 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

We know, from the best evidence, that up to this date, 
Burns was happy ; nay, that he was the gayest, brightest, 
most fantastic, fascinatins^ beingr to be found in the world ; 
more so even than he ever afterwards appeared. But 
now, at this early age, he quits the paternal roof; goes 
forth into looser, louder, more exciting society ; and be- 
comes initiated in those dissipations, those vices, which a 
certain class of philosophers have asserted to be a natural 
preparative for entering on active life ; a kind of mud- 
bath, in which the youth is, as it were, necessitated to 
steep, and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before the real 
toga of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not dis- 
pute much with this class of philosophers ; we hope they 
are mistaken ; for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at 
all stages of life, and are always such indifferent company, 
that it seems hard we should, at any stage, be forced and 
fated not only to meet, but to yield to them ; and even 
serve for a term in their leprous armada. We hope it is 
not so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot be the train- 
ing one receives in this sendee, but only our determining 
to desert from it, that fits us for true manly Action. We 
become men, not after we have been dissipated, and dis- 
appointed in the chase of false pleasure ; but after we 
have ascertained, in any way, what impassable banners 
hem us in through this life ; how mad it is to hope for 
contentment to our infinite soul from the gifts of this ex- 
tremely finite world ! that a man must be sufficient for 
himself; and that " for suffering and enduring^there is no 
remedy but striving and doing." Manhood begins when 
we have in any way made truce with Necessity ; begins, 
at all events, when we have surrendered to Necessity, as 
the most part only do ; but begins joyfully and hopefully 
only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity ; 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 41 

and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in 
Necessity we are free. Surely such lessons as this last, 
which, in one shape or other, is the grand lesson for every 
mortal man, are better learned from the lips of a devout 
mother, in the looks and actions of a devout father, while 
the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in collision with the 
sharp adamant of Fate, attracting us to shipwreck us, 
when the heart is grown hard, and may be broken before 
it will become contrite ! Had Burns continued to learn 
this, as he was already learning it, in his father's cottage, 
he would have learned it fully, which he never did — and 
been saved many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour 
and year of remorseful sorrow. 

It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in 
Burns's history, that at this time too he became involved 
in the religious quarrels of his district ; that he was en- 
listed and feasted, as the fighting man of the New-Light 
Priesthood, in their highly unprofitable warfare. At the 
tables of these free-minded clergy, he learned much more 
than was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule of fana- 
ticism awakened in his mind scruples about Religion 
itself; and a whole world of Doubts, which it required 
quite another set of conjurors than these men to exorcise. 
We do not say that such an intellect as his could have 
escaped similar doubts, at some period of his history; or 
even that he could, at a later period, have come through 
them altogether victorious and unharmed : but it seems 
jDeculiarly unfortunate that this time, above all others, 
should have been fixed for the encounter. For now, with 
pi-inciples assailed by evil example from without, by 
" passions raging like demons" from within, he had little 
need of sceptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat 
of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were already 
4* 



42 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence ; his mind 
is at rariance with itself; the old divinity no longer pre- 
sides there ; but wild Desires and wild Repentance alter- 
nately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed 
himself before the world ; his character for sobriety, dear 
to a Scottish peasant, as few corrupted worldlings can 
even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men ; and his 
only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, 
and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation 
now gathers over him, broken only by the red lightnings 
of remorse. The whole fabric of his life is blasted asun- 
der ; for now not only his character, but his personal 
liberty, is to be lost; men and Fortune are leagued for 
his hurt ; '* hungry Ruin has him in the wind." He sees 
no escape but the saddest of all : exile from his loved 
country, to a country in every sense inhospitable and ab- 
horrent to him. While the " gloomy night is gathering 
fast," in mental storm and solitude, as well as in physical, 
he sings his wild farewell to Scotland : 

" Farewell, my friends, farewell, my foes ! 
My peace with these, my love with those : 
The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr!" 

Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods ; but still a 
false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited 
to Edinburgh : hastens thither with anticipating heart; is 
welcomed as in triumph, and with universal blandishment 
and acclamation ; whatever is wisest, whatever is greatest, 
or loveliest there, gathers round him, to gaze on his face, 
to show him honor, sympathy, affection. Burns's appear- 
ance among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh, must be 
regarded as one of the most singular phenomena in 
modem Literature ; almost like the appearance of some 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 43 

Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of modern Poli- 
tics. For it is nowise as " a mockery king," set there by 
favor, transiently, and for a purpose, that he will let him- 
self be treated ; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sud- 
den elevation turns his too weak head : but he stands 
there on his own basis ; cool, unastonished, holding his 
equal rank from Nature herself; putting forth no claim 
which there is not strength in him, as well as about him, 
to vindicate. Mr Lockhart has some forcible observations 
on this point : 

" It needs no effort of imagination," says he, " to conceive what the 
sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergymen 
or professors) must have been, in the presence of thisbig-boned, black- 
browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who, having 
forced his way among them from the plough-tail, at a single stride, 
manifested, in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation, a most 
thorough conviction that in the society of the most eminent men of 
his nation, he was exactly where he was entitled to be ; hardly 
deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional symptom of 
being flattered by their notice ; by turns calmly measured himself 
against the most cultivated understandings of his time in discussion ; 
overpowered the bon mots of the most celebrated convivialists by broad 
floods of merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of genius ; 
astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of 
social reserve, by compelling them to trembe — nay, to tremble 
visibly — beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos ; and all this 
without indicating the smallest willingness to be ranked among those 
professional ministers of excitement, who are content to be paid in 
money and smiles for doing what the spectators and auditors would 
be ashamed of doing in their own persons, even if they had the power 
of doing it; and last, and probably worst of all, who was known to 
be in the habit of enlivening societies which they would have scorned 
to approach, still more frequently than their own, with eloquence no 
less magnificent: with wit, in all likelihood still more daring; often 
enough as the superiors whom he fronted without alarm might have 
guessed from the beginning, and had, ere long, no occasion to gviess, 
with wit pointed at themselves." — p. 131. 



44 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

The farther we remove from this scene, the more sin- 
gular will it seem to us : details of the exterior aspect of 
it are already full of interest. Most readers recollect Mr. 
Walker's personal interviews with Burns as among the 
best passages of his Narrative ; a time will come when 
this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, slight though it 
is, will also be precious. 

" As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, " I may truly say, Virgilium 
ridi tanium. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, when he came first 
to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enoughtobe much interested 
in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him : but I 
had very little acquaintance with any literary people ; and still less 
with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he most fre- 
quented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my 
father's. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to 
dinner, but had no opportunity to keep his word ; otherwise I might 
have seen more of this distinguished man. As it was, I saw him 
one day at the late venerable Pi'ofessor Ferguson's, where there were 
several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember 
the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart, Of course, we youngsters sat 
silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember, which was 
remarkable in Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him by 
a print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, 
his dog sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow, with 
a child in her arms. These lines were written beneath : 

' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain: 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears.' 

" Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the ideas 
which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked 
whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remem- 
bered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's, called 
by the unpromising title of ' The Justice of Peace.' I whispered my 
information to a friend present, he mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 45 

me with a look and a word, which, though of mere civility, I then 
received and still recollect with very great pleasure. 

*' His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clown- 
ish ; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part •; 
of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. ' 
His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture : but to me it 
conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. 
1 think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the 
portraits, I should have taken the poet, had I not known what he 
was, for a very sagacious country fai-mer of the old Scotch school, 
i. e. none of your modern agriculturists who keep laborers for their 
drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There 
was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his linea- 
ments ; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and 
temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I 
say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest, I never 
saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most 
distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect 
self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men 
who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed 
himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forward- 
ness ; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express 
it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. I do not remember any 
part of his conversation distinctly enough to be quoted ; nor did I 
ever see him again, except in the street, where he did not recognise me, 
as I could not expect he should. He was much caressed in Edin- 
burgh : but (considering what literary emoluments have been since 
his day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling, 

" I remember on this occasion I mention, I thought Burns's ac- 
quaintance with English poetiy was rather limited; and also, that 
having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, 
he talked of them with too much humility as his models : there was 
doubtless national predilection in his estimate. 

*' This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to add, that 
his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer 
dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in malam 
partem^ when I say I never saw a man in company with his supe- 
riors in station or information, more perfectly free from either the 
reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, but did not 
observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential, and 



46 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

always with a turn either to the pathetic or hutiiorous, which engaged 
their attention particularly. I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon 
remark this. — I do not know anything I can add to these recollections 
of forty years since." — pp. 112-115. 

The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of fa- 
vor ; the calm, unaffected, manly manner, in which he not 
only bore it, but estimated its value, has justly been re- 
garded as the best proof that could be given of his real 
vigor and integrity of mind. A little natural vanity, some 
touches of hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of af- 
fectation, at least some fear of being thought affected, we 
could have pardoned in almost any man ; but no such in- 
dication is to be traced here. In his unexampled situa- 
tion the young peasant is not a moment perplexed ; so 
many strange lights do not confuse him, do not lead him 
astray. Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that this 
^vinter did him gi'eat and lasting injury. A somewhat 
clearer knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their cha- 
racters, it did aflbrd him : but a sharper feeling of For- 
tune's unequal arrangements in their social destiny it also 
left with him. He had seen the gay and gorgeous arena, 
in which the powerful are born to play their parts ; nay, 
had himself stood in the midst of it ; and he felt more 
bitterly than ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and 
had no part or lot in that splendid game. From this time 
a jealous indignant fear of social degradation takes pos- 
session of him ; and perverts, so far as aught could pervert, 
his private contentment, and his feelings towards his richer 
fellows. It was clear enough to Burns that he had talent 
enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could 
he but have rightly willed this ; it was clear also that he 
willed something far different, and therefore could not 
make one. Unhappy it was that he had not power 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 47 

to choose the one, and reject the other ; but must halt for 
ever between two opinions, two objects ; making ham- 
pered advancement towards either. But so is it with 
many men : we " long for the merchandise, yet would 
fain keep the price ;" and so stand chaffering with Fate, 
in vexatious altercation, till the Night come, and our fair 
is over ! 

The Edinburgh learned of that period were in general 
more noted for clearness of head than for warmth of 
heart : with the Exception of the good old Blacklock, 
whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely one among them 
seems to have looked at Burns with any true sympathy, 
or indeed much otherwise than as at a highly curious thing. 
By the great, also, he is treated in the customary fashion ; 
entertained at their tables, and dismissed : certain modica 
of pudding and praise are, from time to time, gladly ex- 
changed for the fascination of his presence; which ex- 
change once effected, the bargain is finished, and each 
party goes his several way. At the end of this strange 
season. Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and 
meditates on the chaotic future. In money he is some- 
what richer ; in fame and the show of happiness, infinitely 
richer ; but in the substance of it, as poor as ever. Nay 
poorer, for his heart is now maddened still more with the 
fever of mere worldly Ambition ; and through long years 
the disease will rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and 
weaken his strength for all true and nobler aims. 

What Burns was next to do or to avoid ; how a man so 
circumstanced was now to guide himself towards his true 
advantage, might, at this point of time, have been a ques- 
tion for the wisest : and it was a question which he was 
left altogether to answer for himself: of his learned or 
rich patrons it had not struck any individual to turn a 



48 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

thought on this so trivial matter. Without claiming for 
Bums the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, that 
his Excise and Farm scheme does not seem to us a very 
unreasonable one ; and that we should be at a loss, even 
now, to suggest one decidedly better. Some of his ad- 
mirers, indeed, are scandalized at his ever resolving to 
gauge; and would have had him apparently lie still at the 
pool, till the spirit of Patronage should stir the waters, 
and then heal with one plunge all his worldly sorrows ! 
We fear such counsellors knew but little of Burns ; and 
did not consider that happiness might in all cases be 
cheaply had by waiting for the fulfilment of golden dreams, 
were it not that in the interim the dreamer must die of 
hunger. It reflects credit on the manliness and sound 
sense of Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he 
was standing ; and preferred self-help, on the humblest 
scale, to dependence and inaction, though with hope of 
far more splendid possibilities. But even these possibili- 
ties were not rejected in his scheme : he might expect, 
if it chanced that he 7iad any friend, to rise, in no long 
period, into something even like opulence and leisure ; 
while again, if it chanced that he had no friend, he could 
still live in security ; and for the rest he " did not in- 
tend to borrow honor from any " profession." We 
think then that his plan was honest and well-calculated : 
all turned on the execution of it. Doubtless it failed; 
yet not, we believe, from any vice inherent in itself. Nay, 
after all, it was no failure of external means, but of inter- 
nal, that overtook Burns. His was no bankruptcy of the 
purse, but of the soul ; to his last day, he owed no man 
any thing. 

Meanwhile he begins well : with two good and wise 
actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from a 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 49 

man whose income had lately been seven pounds a-year, 
was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. Generous 
also, and worthy of him, was his treatment of the woman 
whose life's welfare now depended on his pleasure. A 
friendly observer might have hoped serene days for him : 
his mind is on the true road to peace with itself: what 
clearness he still wants will be given as he proceeds ; for 
the best teacher of duties, that still lie dim to us, is the 
Practice of those we see, and have at hand. Had the 
" patrons of genius," who could give him nothing, but 
taken nothing from him, at least nothing more I — the 
wounds of his heart would have healed, vulgar ambition 
would have died away. Toil and Frugality would have 
been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with them, and Poetry 
would have shone through them as of old ; and in her 
clear ethereal light, which was his own by birthright, he 
might have looked down on his earthly destiny, and all its 
obstructions, not with patience only, but with love. 

But the patrons of genius would not have it so. Pic- 
turesque tourists,* all manner of fashionable danglers after 



* There is one little sketch by certain "English gentlemen"' of this 
class, which, though adopted in Currie's Narrative, and since then 
repeated in most others, we have all along felt an invincible disposi- 
tion to regai-d as imaginary : " On a rock that projected into the 
stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appear- 
ance. He had a cap made of fox-skin on his head, a loose great-coat 
fixed round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous High- 
land broad-sword. It was Burns." Now, we rather think, it was 
not Burns. For to say nothing of the fox-skin cap, the loose and 
quite Hibernian watch-coat with the belt, what are we to make of this 
" enormous Highland broad-sword" depending from him ? More 
especially, as there is no word of parish constables on the outlook to 
see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his own midriif, 
or that of the public ! Burns, of all men, had the least need, and the 
5 



50 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

literature, and, far worse, all manner of convivial Mecae- 
nases, hovered round him in his retreat ; and his good as 
well as his weak qualities secured them influence over 
him. He was flattered by their notice ; and his warm 
social nature made it impossible for him to shake them off, 
and hold on his way apart from them. These men, as we 
believe, were proximately the means of his ruin. Not 
that they meant him any ill ; they only meant themselves 
a little good ; if he suffered harm, let Mm look to it ! But 
they wasted his precious time and his precious talent ; 
they disturbed his composure, broke down his returning 
habits of temperance and assiduous contented exertion. 
Their pampering was baneful to him ; their cruelty, which 
soon followed, was equally baneful. The old grudge 
against Fortune's inequality awoke with new bitterness 
in their neighborhood, and Burns had no retreat but to the 
" Rock of Independence," which is but an air-castle, after 
all, that looks well at a distance, but will screen no one 
from real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excite- 
ment, exasperated alternately by contempt of others, and 
contempt of himself. Burns was no longer regaining his 
peace of mind, but fast losing it for ever. There was a 
hollowness at the heart of his life, for his conscience did 
not now approve what he was doing. 

Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless 
remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, 
a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay, with Famine if it 
must be so, was too often altogether hidden from his eyes. 
And yet he sailed a sea, where, without some such guide, 
there was no right steering. Meteors of French Politics 



least tendency, to seek for distinction, either in his own eyes, or those 
of others, by such poor mummeries. 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 51 

rise before liim, but these were not his stars. An accident 
this, which hastened, but did not originate, his worst dis- 
tresses. In the mad contentions of that time, he comes 
in collision with certain official Superiors ; is wounded 
by them ; cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead 
mechanical implement, in any case, be called cruel : and 
shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self-seclusion, into 
gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its uni- 
ty : it is a life of fragments; led with little aim, beyond the 
melancholy one of securing its own continuance, — in fits 
of wild false joy, when such oifered, and of black despond- 
ency when they passed away. His character before the 
world begins to suffer : calumny is busy with him ; for a 
miserable man makes more enemies than friends. Some 
faults he has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes ; but 
deep criminality is what he stands accused of, and they 
that are not without sin, cast the first stone at him ! For 
is he not a well-wisher of the French Revolution, a 
Jacobin, and therefore in that one'act guilty of all 1 These 
accusations, political and moral, it has since appeared, were 
false enough : but the world hesitated little to credit them. 
Nay, his convivial Mecaenases themselves were not the 
last to do it. There is reason to believe that, in his later 
years, the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly withdrawn 
themselves from Burns, as from a tainted person, no longer 
worthy of their acquaintance. That painful class, sta- 
tioned, in all provincial cities, behind the outmost breast- 
work of Gentility, there to stand siege and do battle 
against the intrusions of Qiocerdoxn and Grazierdom, had 
actually seen dishonor in the society of Burns, and branded 
him with their veto ; had, as we vulgarly say, cut him ! 
We find one passage in this work of Mr. Lockhart's, 
which will not out of our thoughts : 



52 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

" A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already more 
than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he was sel- 
dom more grieved, than when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer 
evening about this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns walk- 
ing alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while 
the opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and 
ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of 
whom appeared willing to recognise him. The horseman dismounted, 
and joined Burns, who on his proposing to cross the street said : 
*' Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now ;" and quoted, after 
a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad : 

'His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, 
His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new ; 
But now he let'st wear ony way it will hing, 
And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. 

' O were we young, as we ance hae been, 
"We sud hae been galloping down on yon green, 
And linking it ower the lily-white lea ! 
And werena my lieart light I wad die J 

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain subjects 
escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting these verses, 
assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner ; and taking 
his young friend home with him, entertained, him very agreeably till 
the hour of the ball arrived." < 

Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps " where 
bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his he^rt,"* and 
that most of those fair dames and frizzled gentlemen 
already lie at his side, where the breastwork of gentility 
is quite thrown down, — who would not sigh over the 
thin delusions and foolish toys that divide heart from 
heart, and inaktj man iinmerrifnl to liis brothei- ! 

It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns 



* Ubi sceva indignatio cor ullerius lacerare nequit. — Swift's 
Epitaph. 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 53 

would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught worthy 
of itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody ; not the 
soft breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand of Fate, 
was now sweeping over the strings. And yet what har- 
mony was in him, what music even in his discords ! How 
the wild tones had a charm for the simplest and the 
wisest ; and all men felt and knew that here also was one 
of the Gifted ! " If he entered an inn at midnight, after 
all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circu- 
lated from the cellar to the garret ; and ere ten minutes 
had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assem- 
bled !" Some brief, pure moments of poetic life were 
yet appointed him, in the composition of his Songs. We 
can understand how he grasped at this emjDloyment ; and 
how, too, he spurned all other reward for it but what 
the labor itself brought him. For the soul of Burns, 
though scathed and marred, was yet living in its full moral 
strength, though sharply conscious of its eiTors and abase- 
ment : and here, in his destitution and degradation, was 
one act of seeming nobleness and self-devotedness left 
even for him to perform, He felt, too, that with all the 
" thoughtless follies" that had " laid him low," the world 
was unjust and cruel to him ; and he silently appealed to 
another and calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, but as 
a patriot, would he strive for the glory of his country : so 
he cast from him the poor sixpence a-day, and served 
zealously as a volunteer. Let us not grudge him this last 
luxury of his existence ; let him not have appealed to us 
in vain ? The money was not necessary to him ; he 
struggled through without it : long since, these guineas 
would have been gone, and now the high-mindedness of 
refusing them will plead for- him in all hearts for ever. 
We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life ; for 
5* 



54 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

matters had now taken such a shape with him as could 
not long continue. If improvement was not to be looked 
for, Nature could only for a limited time maintain this 
dark and maddening warfare against the world and itself. 
We are not medically informed whether any continuance 
of years was, at this period, probable for Burns ; whether 
his death is to be looked on as in some sense an accidental 
event, or only as the natural consequence of the long series 
of events that had preceded. The latter seems to be the 
likelier opinion ; and yet it is by no means a certain one. 
At all events, as we have said, some change could not be 
very distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems to us, 
were open for Burns : clear poetical activity; madness ; 
or death. The first, with longer life, was still possible, 
though not probable ; for physical causes w^ere beginning 
to be concerned in it : and yet Burns had an iron resolu- 
tion ; could he but have seen and felt, that not only his 
highest glory, but his first duty, and the true medicine for 
all his woes, lay here. The second was still less probable ; 
for his mind was ever among the clearest and firmest. 
So the milder third gate was opened for him : and he 
passed, not softly, yet speedily, into that still country, 
where the hail-storms and fire-showers do not reach, and 
the heaviest-laden wayfarer at length lays down his load ! 

Contemplating this sad end of Bums, and how he sank 
unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise sympa- 
thy, generous minds have sometimes figured to themselves, 
with a reproachful sorrow, that much might have been 
done for him ; that by counsel, true affection, and friendly 
ministrations, he might have been saved to himself and 
the world. We question whether there is not more ten- 
derness of heart than soundness of judgment in these 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 55 

suggestions. It seems dubious to us whether the richest, 
wisest, most benevolent individual, could have lent Burns 
any effectual help. Counsel, which seldom profits any 
one, he did not need ; in his understanding, he knew the 
right from the wrong, as well perhaps as any man ever 
did; but the persuasion which would have availed him, 
lies not so much in the head, as in the heart, where no 
argument or expostulation could have assisted much to 
implant it. As to money again, we do not really believe 
that this was his essential want ; or well see how any 
private man could, even presupposing Bums's consent, 
have bestowed on him an independent fortune, with much 
prospect of decisive advantage. It is a mortifying truth, 
that two men in any rank of society could hardly be found 
virtuous enough to give money, and to take it, as a neces- 
sary gift, without injury to the moral entireness of one or 
both. But so stands the fact. Friendship, in the old 
heroic sense of that term, no longer exists; except in the 
cases of kindred or other legal affinity ; it is in reality no 
longer expected, or recognised as a virtue among men. 
A close observer of manners has pronounced " Patronage," 
that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, to be 
" twice cursed;" cursing him that gives, and him that 
takes ! And thus, in regard to outward matters also, it 
has become the rule, as in regard to inward it always was 
and must be the rule, that no one shall look for effectual 
help to another ; but that each shall rest contented with 
what help he can afford himself. Such, we say, is the 
principle of modern Honor ; naturally enough growing 
out of that sentiment of Pride, which we inculcate and 
encourage as the basis of our whole social morality. 
Many a poet has been poorer than Burns ; but no one 
was ever prouder ; we may question, whether, without 



56 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

great precautions, even a pension from Royalty would 
not have galled and encumbered, more than actually 
assisted him. 

Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with an- 
other class of Bums's admirers, who accuse the higher 
ranks among us of having ruined Buras by their selfish 
neglect of him. We have already stated our doubts 
whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered, would 
have been accepted, or could have proved very effectual. 
We shall readily admit, however, that much was to be 
done for Burns ; that many a poisoned arrow might have 
been warded from his bosom ; many an entanglement in 
his path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful ; and 
light and heat, shed on him from high places, would have 
made his humble atmosphere more genial ; and the softest 
heart then breathing might have lived and died with some 
fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant further, and for Burns 
it is granting much, that with all his pride, he would have 
thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one who 
had cordially befriended him : patronage, unless once 
cursed, needed not to have been twice so. At all events, 
the poor promotion he desired in his calling might have 
been granted : it was his own scheme, therefore likelier 
than any other to be of service. All this it might have 
been a luxury, nay, it was a duty, for our nobility to have 
done. No part of all this, however, did any of them do ; 
or apparently attempt, or wish to do : so much is granted 
against them. *But A^hat then is the amount of their 
blame ? Simj^ly that they were men of the world, and 
walked by the principles of such men ; that they treated 
Burns, as other nobles and other commoners had done 
other poets ; as the English did Shakspeare ; as King 
Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip and 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 57 

his Grandees did Cervantes. Do men gather grapes of 
thorns 1 or shall we cut down our thorns for yielding 
only ajence, and haws 1 How, indeed, could the ** nobili- 
ty and gentry of his native land" hold out any help to this 
" Scottish Bard, proud of his name and country V Were 
the nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to help 
themselves ] Had they not their game to preserve ; their 
borough interests to strengthen ; dinners, therefore, of 
various kinds to eat and give '? Were their means more 
than adequate to all this business, or less than adequate 1 
Less than adequate in general : a few of them in reality 
were richer than Burns ; many of them were poorer ; for 
sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with thumb- 
screws, from the hard hand ; and, in their need of guineas, 
to forget their duty of mercy ; which Bums was never re- 
duced to do. Let us pity and forgive them. The game 
they preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, 
the borough interests they strengthened, the little Baby- 
Ions they severally builded by the glory of their might, 
are all melted, or melting back into the primeval Chaos, 
as man's merely selfish endeavors are fated to do : and 
here was an action, extending, in virtue of its worldly in- 
fluence, we may say, through all time ; in virtue of its 
moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal as the 
Spirit of Goodness itself; this action was offered them to 
do, and light was not given them to do it. Let us pity 
and forgive them. But, better than pity, let us go and 
do ot/ierwise. Human suffering did not end with the life 
of Burns 3 neither was the solemn mandate, "Love one 
another, bear one another's burdens," given to the rich 
only, but to all men. True, we shall find no Bums to re- 
lieve, to assuage by our aid or our pity ; but celestial na- 
tures, groaning under the fardels of a weary life, we shall 



58 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

Still find ; and that wretchedness which Fate has rendered 
voiceless and tuneless, is not the least wretched, but the 
most. 

Still we do not think that the blame of Burns's failure 
lies chiefly with the world. The world, it seems to us, 
treated him with more, rather than with less kindness, 
than it usually shows to such men. It has ever, we fear, 
shown but small favor to its Teachers ; hunger and naked- 
ness, perils and reviling, the prison, the cross, the poison- 
chalice, have, in most times and countries, been the 
market-price it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome with 
which it has greeted those who have come to enlighten 
and purify it. Homer and Socrates, and the Christian 
Apostles, belong to old days ; but the world's Martyrology 
was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo 
languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso pines in the cell of 
a mad-house, Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lis- 
bon. So neglected, so " persecuted they the Prophets," 
not in Judea only, but in all j^laces where men have been. 
We reckon that every poet of Burns's order is, or should 
be, a prophet and teacher to his age ; that he has no right 
therefore to expect great kindness from it, but rather is 
bound to do it great kindness ; that Burns, in particular, 
experienced fully the usual proportion of the world's 
goodness ; and that the blame of his failure, as we have 
said, lies not chiefly with the world. 

Where then does it lie % We are forced to answer : 
With himself; it is his inward, not his uiitwiud misfor- 
tunes, that bring him to the dust. Seldoiu, indeed, is it 
otherwise ; seldom is a life morally wrecked, but the 
grand cause lies in some internal mal- arrangement, some 
want less of good fortune than of good guidance. Na- 
ture fashions no creature without implanting in it the 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 59 

Strength needful for its action and duration ; least of all 
does she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, the 
poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is in the 
power of any external circumstances utterly to ruin the 
mind of a man ; nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even 
so much as to affect its essential health and beauty. The 
sternest sum-total of all worldly misfortunes is Death ; no- 
thing more can lie in the cup of human wo : yet many 
men, in all ages, have triumphed over Death, and led it 
captive ; converting its physical victory into a moral vic- 
tory for themselves, into a seal and immortal consecra- 
tion for all that their past life had achieved. What has 
been done, may be done again : nay, it is but the degree 
and not the kind of such heroism that differs in different 
seasons ; for without some portion of this spirit, not of 
boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial, 
in all its forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has 
ever attained to be good. 

We have already stated the error of Bums ; and mourn- 
ed over it, rather than blamed it. It was the want of 
unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims ; the hap- 
less attempt to mingle in friendly union the common 
spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a 
far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns 
was nothing wholly; and Burns could be nothing, no man 
formed as he was can be anything, by halves. The heart, 
not of a mere hot-blooded, popular verse-monger, or jDoet- 
ical Restaur afctir, but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy 
of the old religious heroic times, had been given him : 
and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of 
scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true Noble- 
ness was little understood, and its place supplied by a 
hollow, dissocial, altogether baiTen and unfruitful jDrinci- 



60 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

pie of Pride. The influences of that age, his open, kind, 
susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly untoward 
situation, made it more than usually difficult for him to 
repel or resist; the better spirit that was within him ever 
sternly demanded its rights, its supremacy : he spent his 
life in endeavoring to reconcile these two ; and lost it, as 
he must have lost it, without reconciling them here. 
/ Burns was born poor; and born also'to continue poor, 
for he would not endeavor to be otherwise : this it had 
been well could he have once for all admitted, and con- 
sidered as finally settled. He was poor, truly ; hut hun- 
dreds even of his own class and order of minds have been 
poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it : nay, his 
own Father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny 
than his was ; and he did not yield to it, but died cou- 
rageously warring, and to all moral intents prevailing, 
against it. True, Burns had little means, had even little 
time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation ; but 
so much the more precious was what little he had. In 
all these external respects his case was hard; but very 
far from the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery, and 
much worse evils, it has often been the lot of Poets and 
wise men to strive with, and their glory to conquer. 
Locke was banished as a traitor ; and wrote his Essay on 
the Human Understanding, sheltering himself in a Dutch 
garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease, when he com- 
posed Paradise Lost 1 Not only low, but fallen from a 
height; not only poor but impoverished; in darkness and 
with dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, 
and found fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes 
finish his work, a maimed soldier, and in prison ? Nay, 
was not the Araucana, which Spain acknowledges as its 
Epic, written without even the aid of paper ; on scraps of 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 61 

leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any 
moment from that wild warfare ] 

And what then had these men, which Burns wanted? 
Two things ; both which, it seems to us, are indispensa- 
ble for such men. They had a true, religious principle 
of morals ; and a single not a double aim in their activity. 
They were not self-seekers and self- worshippers : but 
seekers and worshippers of something far better than 
Self. Not personal enjoyment was their object ; but a 
high heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly 
Wisdom in one or the other form, ever hovered before 
them ; in which cause, they neither shrunk from suffering, 
nor called on the earth to witness it as something won- 
derful ; but patiently endured, counting it blessedness 
enough so to spend and be spent. Thus the " golden-calf 
of Self-love," however curiously carved, was not their 
Deity ; but the Invisible Goodness, which alone is man's 
reasonable service. This feeling was as a celestial foun- 
tain, whose streams refreshed into gladness and beauty 
all the provinces of their otherwise too desolate existence. 
In a word, they willed one thing, to which all other things 
were subordinated, and made subservient ; and therefore 
they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks; but 
its edge must be sharp and single : if it be double, the 
wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing. 

Part of this superiority these men owed to their age ; 
in which heroism and devotedness were still practised, or 
at least not yet disbelieved in : but much of it likewise 
they owed to themselves. With Burns again it was dif- 
ferent. His morahty, in most of its practical points, is 
that of a mere worldly man ; enjoyment, in a finer or 
coarser shape, is the only thing he loves and strives for. 
A noble instinct sometimes raises him above this ; but an 
6 



62 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

instinct only, and acting only for moments. He has no 
Religion ; in the shallow age where his days were cast, 
Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old 
Ijight Jar7ns of Religion ; and was, with these, becoming 
obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive 
with a trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his 
understanding. He lives in darkness and in the shadow 
of doubt. His Religion, at best, is an anxious wish ; like 
that of Rabelais, ''a great Perhaps." 

He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; could he 
but have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided 
heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns could have 
followed it, is but another form of Wisdom, of Religion ; 
is itself Wisdom and Religion. But this also was denied 
him. His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, w^hich will not 
be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the true 
light of his path, but is often a v/ildfire that misleads him. 
It was not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to 
seem, " independent ;" but it was necessary for him to be 
at one with his own heart ; to place what was highest in 
his nature, highest also in his life; " to seek within him- 
self for that consistency and sequence, which external 
events would for ever refuse him." He was born a poet ; 
poetry was the celestial element of his being, and should 
have been the soul of his whole endeavors. Lifted into 
that serene ether, whither he had wings given him to 
mount, he would have needed no other elevation. Poverty, 
neglect, and all evil, save the desecration of himself and 
his Art, were a small matter to him ; the pride and the 
passions of the world lay far beneath his feet ; and he 
looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince and beg- 
gar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear recog- 
nition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 63 

Nay^ we question whether for his culture as a Poet, 
poverty, and much suffering for a season, were not 
absolutely advantageous. Great men, in looking back over 
their lives, have testified to that effect. *' I would not for 
much," says Jean Paul, " that I had been born richer." 
And yet Paul's birth was poor enough ; for, in another 
place, he adds : " the prisoner's allowance is bread and 
water; and I had often only the latter." But the gold 
that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest ; 
or, as he has himself expressed it, **the canary-bird sings 
sweeter the longer it has been trained in a darkened 
cage." 

A man like Burns might have divided his hours between 
poetry and virtuous industry; industry which all true 
feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has a beauty, 
for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones : but to divide 
his hours between poetry and rich men's banquets, was 
an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How could he 
be at ease at such banquets 1 What had he to do there, 
mingling his music with the coarse roar of altogether 
earthly voices, and brightening the thick smoke of intoxi- 
cation with fire lent him from heaven? Was it his aim 
to enjoy life ] To-morrow he must go drudge as an Excise- 
man ! We wonder not that Burns became moody, indig- 
nant, and at times an offender against certain rules of 
society ; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, 
and run a muck against them all. How could a man, so 
falsely placed, by his own or others' fault, ever know con- 
tentment or peaceable diligence for an hour % What he 
did, under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore 
to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength 
and worth of his character. 

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness : 



64 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

but not in others ; only in himself; least of all in simple 
increase of wealth and worldly *' respectability." We 
hope we have now heard enough about the efficacy of 
wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay, have 
we not seen another instance of it in these very days ] 
Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal 
than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish 
ploughman, but of an English peer : the highest worldly 
honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance ; 
the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another 
province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail 
him 1 Is he happy, is he good, is he true ? Alas, he has 
a poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the 
Eternal ; and soon feels that all this is but mounting to the 
house-top to reach the stars ! Like Bums, he is only a 
proud man ; might like him have " purchased a pocket- 
copy of Milton to study the character of Satan ;" for 
Satan also is Byron's grand exemplar, the hero of his 
poetry, and the model apparently of his conduct. As in 
Bums's case too, the celestial element will not mingle 
with the clay of earth ; both poet and man of the world 
he must not be ; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly with 
poetic Adoration ; he cannot sers-^e God and Mammon. 
Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay, he is the most 
wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged : the 
fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming 
into beauty the products of a world ; but it is the mad 
fire of a volcano ; and now — we look sadly into the ashes 
of a crater, which, erelong, will fill itself with snow ! 

Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to 
their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer 
Truth ; they had a message to deliver, which left them no 
rest till it was accomplished ; in dim throes of pain, this 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 65 

divine behest lay smouldering within them ; for they knew 
not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipa- 
tion, and they had to die without articulately uttering it. 
They are in the camp of the Unconverted. Yet not as 
high messengers of rigorous though benignant truth, but 
as soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fellowship, will 
they live there ; they are first adulated, then persecuted ; 
they accomplish little for others ; they find no peace for 
themselves, but only death and the ^peace of the grave. 
We confess, it is not without a certain mournful awe that 
we view the fate of these noble souls, so richly gifted, yet 
ruined to so little purpose with all their gifts. It seems 
to us there is a stern moral taught in this piece of history, 
— twice told us in our own time ! Surely to men of like 
genius, if there be any such, it canies with it a lesson of 
deep impressive significance. Surely it would become 
such a man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, 
that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well what it 
is that he attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For 
the words of Milton are true in all times, and were never 
truer than in this : " He, who would write heroic poems, 
must make his whole life a heroic poem." If he cannot 
first so make his life, then let him hasten from this arena ; 
for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful perils are for 
him. Let him dwindle into a modish ballad-monger ; let 
him worship and be-sing the idols of the time, and the 
time will not fail to reward him, — if, indeed, he can 
endure to live in that capacity ! Byron and Bums could 
not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts 
consumed them ; and better it was for them that they 
could not. For it is not in the favor of the great, or of 
the small, but in a life of truth, and in the inexpugnable 
citadel of his own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's strength 
6* 



66 CRITICAL ESSAY. 

must lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, or know 
how to reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth 
with favor and furtherance for literature ; like the costliest 
flower-jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not 
the relation be mistaken. A true poet is not one whom 
they can hire by money or flattery to be a minister of their 
pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, their purveyor 
of table-wit ; he cannot be their menial, he cannot even 
be their partisan. At the peril of both parties, let no 
such union be attempted ! Will a Courser of the Sun 
work softly in the harness of a Dray-horse ? His hoofs 
are of fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing 
light to all lands : will he lumber on mud highways, drag- 
ging ale for earthly appetites, from door to door ] 

But we must stop short in these considerations, which 
would lead us to boundless lengths. We had something 
to say on the public moral character of Burns ; but this 
also we must forbear. We are far from regarding him 
as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average ; 
nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten 
thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that 
where the Flehiscita of common civic reputations are pro- 
nounced, he has seemed to us even there less worthy of 
blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habit- 
ually unjust in its judgments of such men ; unjust on 
many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the 
substance : It decides, like a court of law, by dead sta- 
tutes ; and not positively but negatively, less on what is 
done right, than on what is, or is not, done wrong. Not 
the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, 
which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the 
whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This 
orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the 



CRITICAL ESSAY. 67 

solar system; or it maybe a city hippodrome ; nay, the 
circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. 
But the inches of deflection only are measured ; and it is 
assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the 
planet, will yield the same ratio when compared with them. 
Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of 
Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to 
with approval. Granted, the ship comes into harbor with 
shrouds and tackle damaged : and the pilot is therefore 
blame-worthy ; for he has not been all- wise and all-power- 
ful ; but to know liow blame-worthy, tell us first whether 
his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to Rams- 
gate and the Isle of Dogs, 

With our readers in general, with men of right feeling 
anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In 
pitying admiration, he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in 
a far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble; neither 
will his "Works, even as they are, pass away from the 
memory of men. While the Shakspeares and Miltons 
roll on like mighty rivers through the country of Thought, 
bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on 
their waves ; this little Valclusa Fountain will also arrest 
our eye. For this also is of Nature's own and most cun- 
ning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, 
with a full gushing current, into the light of day ; and 
often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear 
waters, and muse among its rocks and pines ! 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 



Robert Burns, the chief of the peasant poets of Scot- 
land, was born in a little mud-walled cottage on the banks 
of Doon, near " Alloway's auld haunted kirk," in the shire 
of Ayr, on the 25th day of January, 1759. As a natural 
mark of the event, a sudden storm at the same moment 
swept the land : the gable-wall of the frail dwelling gave 
way, and the babe-bard was hurried through a tempest 
of wind and sleet to the shelter of a securer hovel. He 
was the eldest born of three sons and three daughters ; 
his father, William, who in his native Kincardineshire, 
wrote his name Burness, was bred a gardener, and sought 
for work in the West ; but coming from the lands of the 
noble family of the Keiths, a suspicion accompanied him 
that he had been out — as rebellion was softly called — 
in the forty-five : a suspicion fatal to his hopes of rest and 
bread, in so loyal a district ; and it was only when the 
clergyman of his native parish certified his loyalty that 
he was permitted to toil. This suspicion of Jacobitism, 
revived by Burns himself, when he rose into fame, seems 
not to have influenced either the feelings, or the tastes of 
Agnes Brown, a young woman on the Doon, whom he 
wooed and married in December, 1757, when he was 
thirty-six years old. To support her, he leased a small 



70 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

piece of ground, which he converted into a nursery and 
garden, and to shelter her, he raised with his own hands 
that humble abode where she gave birth to her eldest son. 
The elder Burns was a well-informed, silent, austere 
man, who endured no idle gaiety, nor indecorous lan- 
guage : while he relaxed somewhat the hard, stem creed 
of the Covenanting times, he enforced all the work-day, 
as wejl as sabbath-day observances, which the Calvinistic 
kirk requires, and scrupled at promiscuous dancing, as 
the staid of our own day scruple at the waltz. His wife 
was of a milder mood : she was blest with a singular for- 
titude of temper ; was as devout of heart, as she was 
calm of mind ; and loved, while busied in her household 
concerns, to sweeten the bitterer moments of life, by 
chanting the songs and ballads of her country, of which 
her store was great. The garden and nursery prospered 
so much, that he was induced to widen his views, and by 
the help of his kind landlord, the laird of Doonholm, and 
the more questionable aid of borrowed money, he entered 
upon a neighboring farm, named Mount OlijDhant, extend- 
ing to an hundred acres. This was in 1765 ; but the land 
was hungry and sterile ; the seasons proved rainy and 
rough ; the toil was certain, the reward unsure ; when to 
his sorrow, the laird of Doonholm — a generous Fergu- 
son — died: the strict terms of the lease, as well as the 
rent, were exacted by a harsh factor, and with his wife 
and children, he was obliged, after a losing struggle of 
six years, to relinquish the farm, and seek shelter on the 
gi'ounds of Lochlea, some ten miles off, in the parish of 
Tarbolton. When, in after-days, men's characters were 
in the hands of his eldest son, the scoundrel factor sat for 
that lasting portrait of insolence and wrong, in the " Twa 
Dogs." 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 71 

In this new farm William Burns seemed to strike root, 
and thrive. He was strong of body and ardent of mind : 
every day brought increase of vigor to his three sons, 
who, though very young, already put their hands to the 
plough, the reap-hook, and the flail. But it seemed that 
nothing which he undertook was decreed in the end to 
prosper : after four seasons of prosperity a change en- 
sued : the farm was far from cheap ; the gains under any 
lease were then so little, that the loss of a few pounds 
was ruinous to a farmer: bad seed and wet seasons had 
their usual influence : " The gloom of hermits and the 
moil of galley-slaves," as the poet, alluding to those days, 
said, were endured to no purpose ; when to crown all, a 
difference arose between the landlord and the tenant, as 
to the terms of the lease ; and the early days of the poet, 
and the declining years of his father, were harassed by 
jligputes, in which sensitive minds are sure to suffer, 
j Amid these labors and disputes, the poet's father re- 
membered the worth of religious, and moral instruction : 
he took part of this upon himselfj A week-day in Lochlea 
wore the sober looks of a Sunday : he read the Bible and 
explained, as intelligent peasants are accustomed to do, 
the sense, when dark or difficult ; he loved to discuss the 
spiritual meanings, and gaze on the mystical splendors of 
the Revelations. He was aided in these labors, first, by 
the schoolmaster of Alloway-mill, near the Doon ; se- 
condly, by John Murdoch, student of divinity, who un- 
dertook to teach arithmetic, grammar, French, and Latin, 
to the boys of Lochlea, and the sons of five neighboring 
farmers. Murdoch, who was an enthusiast in learning, 
much of a pedant, and such a judge of genius that he 
thought wit should always be laughing, and poetry wear 
an eternal smile, performed his task well : he found 



72 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

Robert to be quick of apprehension, and not afraid to 
study when knowledge was the rev/ard. He taught him 
to turn verse into its natural prose order; to supply all 
the ellipses, and not to desist till the sense was clear and 
plain : he also, in their walks, told him the names of dif- 
ferent objects, both in Latin and French : and though his 
knowledge of these languages never amounted to much, 
he approached the grammar of the English tongue, 
through the former, which was of material use to him, in 
his poetic compositions. Bums was, even in those early 
days, a sort of enthusiast in all that concerned the glory 
of Scotland ; he used to fancy himself a soldier of the 
days of the Wallace and the Bruce : loved to strut after 
the bag-pipe and the drum, and read of the bloody struggles 
of his country for freedom and existence, till " a Scottish 
prejudice," he says, ** was poured into my veins, which 
will boil there till the flood-gates of life are shut in eter- 
nal rest." 

In this mood of mind Burns was unconsciously ap- 
proaching the land of poesie. In addition to the histories 
of the Wallace and the Bruce, he found, on the shelves of 
his neighbors, not only whole bodies of divinity, and ser- 
mons without limit, but the works of some of the best 
English, as well as Scottish poets, together with songs 
and ballads innumerable. On these he loved to pore 
whenever a moment of leisure came ; nor was verse his 
sole favorite ; he desired to drink knowledge at any foun- 
tain, and Guthrie's Grammar, Dickson on Agriculture, 
Addison's Spectator, Locke on the Human Understand- 
ing, and Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin were 
as welcome to his heart as Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, 
Thomson and Young. There is a mystery in the work- 
ings of genius : with these poets in his head and hand, 



LIFE OP ROBERT BURNS. 73 

we see not that he has advanced one step in the way in 
which he was soon to walk ; "■ Highland Mary," and 
'" Tam o' Shanter," sprang from other inspirations. 

Burns lifts up the veil himself, from the studies which 
made him a poet. " In my boyish days," he says to. 
Moore, " I owed much to an old woman (Jenny Wilson) 
who resided in the family, remarkable for her credulity 
and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collec- 
tion in the country of tales and songs, concerning devils, 
ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, 
kelpies, elfcandles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cant- 
raips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trum- 
pery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poesie ; but had 
so strong an effect upon my imagination that to this hour, 
in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a look-out on 
suspicious places." Here we have the young poet taking 
lessons in the classic lore of his native land : in the school 
of Janet Wilson he profited largely ; her tales gave a 
hue, all their own, to many noble effusions. But her 
teaching was at the hearth-stone : when he was in the 
fields, either driving a cart or walking to labor, he had 
ever in his hand a collection of songs, such as any stall 
in the land could supply him with; and over these he 
pored, ballad by ballad, and verse by verse, noting the 
true, tender, and the natural sublime from affectation and 
fustian. " To this," he said, " I am convinced that I owe 
much of my critic craft, such as it is." His mother, too, 
unconsciously led him in the ways of the muse ; she loved 
to recite or sing to him a strange, but clever ballad, called 
" the Life and Age of Man : " this strain of piety and 
imagination was in his mind when he wrote " Man was 
made to Mourn." 

He found other teachers-^ of a tenderer nature and 
7 



74 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

softer influence. " You know," he says to Moore, **our 
country custom of coupling a man and woman together 
as partners in the labors of harvest. In my fifteenth 
autumn my partner was a bewitching creature, a year 
younger than myself : she was in truth a bonnie, sweet, 
sonsie lass, and unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that 
delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, 
gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold 
to be the first of human joys. How she caught the con- 
tagion I cannot tell ; I never expressly said I loved her : 
indeed I did not know myself why I liked so much to 
loiter behind with her, when returning in the evenings 
from our labors ; why the tones of her voice made my 
heart-strings thrill like an ^olian harp, and particularly 
why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked 
and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel 
nettle-stings and thistles. Among other love-inspiring 
qualities, she sang sweetly, and it was her favorite reel to 
which I attempted to give an embodied vehicle in rhyme ; 
thus with me began love and verse." This intercourse 
with the fair part of the creation, was, to his slumbering 
emotions, a voice from heaven to call them into life and 
poetry. 

From the school of traditionary lore and love, Burns 
now went to a rougher academy. Lochlea, though not 
producing fine crops of corn, was considered excellent 
for flax; and while the cultivation of this commodity was 
committed to his father and his brother Gilbert,- he was 
sent to Irvine, at Midsummer, 1781, to learn the trade of 
a flax-dresser, under one Peacock, kinsman to his mother. 
Some time before, he had spent a portion of a summer at 
a school in Kirkoswald, learning mensuration and land- 
surveying, where he had mingled in scenes of sociality 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 75 

with smugglers, and enjoyed the pleasure of a silent 
walk, under the moon, with the young and the beautiful. 
At Irvine, he labored by day to acquire a knowledge of 
his business, and at night he associated with the gay and 
the thoughtless, with whom he learnt to empty his glass, 
and indulge in free discourse on topics forbidden at Loch- 
lea. He had one small room for a lodging, for which he , 
gave a shilling a week : meat he seldom tasted, and his 
food consisted chiefly of oatmeal and potatoes sent from 
his father's house. In a letter to his father, written with 
great purity and simplicity of style, he thus gives a pic- 
ture of himself, mental and bodily, " Honored Sir, I have 
purposely delayed writing, in the hope that I should have 
the pleasure of seeing you on new year's day, but work 
comes so hard upon us that I do not choose to be absent 
on that account. My health is nearly the same as when 
you were here, only my sleep is a little sounder, and, on 
the whole, I am rather better than otherwise, though I 
mend by very slow degrees : the weakness of my nerves 
has so debilitated my mind that I dare neither review past 
wants nor look forward into futurity, for the least anxiety 
or perturbation in my breast produce most unhappy 
effects on ray whole frame. Sometimes indeed, when 
for an hour or two my spirits are a little lightened, I 
gliimncr a little into futurity ; but my principal and indeed 
my only pleasurable employment is looking backwards 
and forwards in a moral and religious way. I am quite 
transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very 
soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains and un- 
easinesses, and disquietudes of this weary life. As for 
the world, I despair of ever making a figure in it : I am 
not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of 
the gay. I foresee that poverty and obscurity probably 



76 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS, 

await me, and I am in some measure prepared and daily 
preparing to meet them. I have but just time and paper 
to return you my grateful thanks for the lessons of virtue 
and piety you have given me, which were but too much 
neglected at the time of giving them, but which, I hope* 
have been remembered ere it is yet too late." This 
remarkable letter was written in the twenty-second year 
of his age ; it alludes to the illness which seems to 
have been the companion of his youth, a nervous head- 
ache, brought on by constant toil and anxiety ; and it 
speaks of the melancholy which is the common attendant 
of genius, and its sensibilities, aggravated by despair of 
distinction. The catastrophe v/hich hajipened ere this 
letter was well in his father's hand, accords ill with quo- 
tations from the Bible, and hopes fixed in heaven : ■ — "As 
we gave," he says, " a welcome carousal to the new year, 
the shop took fire, and burnt to ashes, and I was left like 
a true poet, not worth a sixpence." 

This disaster was followed by one more grievous ; his 
father was well in years when he was married, and age 
and a constitution injured by toil and disappointment, 
began to press him down, ere his sons had grown up to 
man's estate. On all sides the clouds began to darken ; 
the farm was unprosperous : the speculations in flax failed ; 
and the landlord of Lochlea, raising a question upon the 
meaning of the lease, concerning rotation of crop, pushed 
the matter to a law-suit, alike ruinous to a poor man 
either in its success or its failure. "After three years toss- 
ing and whirling," says Burns, "in the vortex .of litiga- 
tion, my father was just saved from the horrors of a jail 
by a consumption, which, after two years' promises, 
kindly stept in, and carried him away to where the " wick- 
ed cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." His 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 77 

all went among the hell-hounds that prowl in the kennel of 
justice. The finishing evil which brought up the rear of 
this infernal file, was my constitutional melancholy being 
increased to such a degree, that for three months I was 
in a state of mind scarcely to be envied by the hopeless 
wretches who have got their mittimus, * Depart from me, 
ye cursed.'" 

Robert Burns was now the head of his father's house. 
He gathered together the little that law and misfortune 
had spared, and took the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauch- 
line, containing one hundred and eighteen acres, at a rent 
of ninety pounds a year : his mother and sisters took the 
domestic superintendence of home, barn, and byre ; and 
he associated his brother Gilbert in the labors of the land. 
It was made a joint affair : the poet was young, willing, 
and vigorous, and excelled in ploughing, sowing, reaping, 
mowing, and thrashing. His wages were fixed at seven 
pounds per annum, and such for a time was his care and 
frugality, that he never exceeded this small allowance. 
He purchased books on farming, held conversations with 
the old and the knowing; and said unto himself, " I shall 
be prudent and wise, and my shadow shall increase in the 
land." But it was not decreed that these resolutions 
were to endure, and that he was to become a mighty agri- 
culturist in the west. Farmer Attention, as the proverb 
says, is a good farmer, all the world over, and Burns was 
sudi by fits and by starts. But he who writes an ode on 
the sheep he is about to shear, a poem on the flower that 
he covers with the furrow, who sees visions on his way to 
market, who makes rhymes on the horse he is about to 
yoke, and a song on the girl who shows the whitest hands 
among his reapers, has small chance of leading, a market, 
or of being laird of the fields he rents. The dreams of 



78 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS/ 

Bums were of the muses, and not of rising markets, of 
golden locks rather than of yellow corn : he had other 
faults. It is not known that William Burns was aware 
before his death that his eldest son had sinned in rhyme ; 
but we have Gilbert's assurance, that his father went to 
the grave in ignorance of his son's errors of a less venial 
kind — unwitting that he was soon to give a two-fold 
proof of both in " Rob the Rhymer's Address to his Bas- 
tard Child" — a poem less decorous than witty. 

The dress and condition of Burns when he became a 
poet were not at all poetical, in the minstrel meaning 
of the word. His clothes, coarse and homely, were made 
from home-grown wool, shorn off his own sheeps' backs, 
carded and spun at his own fire-side, woven by the village 
weaver, and when not of natural hodden-gray ,"'dyed a half- 
blue in the village vat. They^were shaped and sewed by the 
district tailor, who usually wrought at the rate of a groat a 
day and his food ; and as the wool was coarse, so also was 
the workmanship. The linen which he wore was home- 
grown, home-hackled, home-spun, home- woven, and home- 
bleached, and unless designed for Sunday use, was of 
coarse, strong hara, to suit the tear and wear of barn and 
field. His shoes came from rustic tanpits, for most 
farmers then prepared their own leather ; were armed 
sole and heel, with heavy, broad-headed nails, to endure 
the clod and the road : as hats were then littl^ in use, save 
among small lairds or country gentry, westlan heads were 
commonly covered with a coarse, broad, blue bonnet, with 
a stopple on its flat crown, made in thousands at Kilmar- 
nock, and known in all lands by the name of scoire bon- 
nets. His plaid was a handsome red and white check — 
for pride in poets, he said, was no sin — prepared of fine 
wool with more than common care, by the hands of his 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 79 

mother and sisters, and woven with more skill than the 
village weaver was usually required to exert. His dwell- 
ing was in keeping with his dress, a low, thatched house, 
with a kitchen, a bed-room and closet, with floors of knead- 
ed clay, and ceilings of moorland turf; a few books on 
a shelf, thumbed by many a thumb; a few hams drying 
above head in the smoke, which was in no haste to get 
out at the roof — a wooden settle, some oak chairs, chaff 
beds well covered with blankets, with a fire of peat and 
wood burnintr at a distance from the gable wall, on the 
middle of the floor. His food was as homely as his habi- 
tation, and consisted chiefly of oatmeal-porridge, barley- 
broth and potatoes, and milk. How the muse happened 
to visit him in this clay biggin, take a fancy to a clout- 
erly peasant, and teach him strains of consummate beauty 
and elegance, must ever be a matter of wonder to 
all those, and they are not few, who hold that noble senti- 
ments and heroic deeds are the exclusive portion of the 
gently nursed and the far descended. 

Of the earlier verses of Bums few are preserved : when 
composed he put them on paper, but he kept them to 
himself: tliough a poet at sixteen, he seems not to have 
made even his brother his confidante till he became a man, 
and his judgment had ripened. He, however, made a 
little clasped paper book his treasurer, and under the head 
of " Observations, Hints, Songs, and Scraps of Poetry," 
we may find many a wayward and impassioned verse, 
songs rising little above the humblest country strain, or 
bursting into an elegance and a beauty worthy of the 
highest of minstrels. The first words noted down are the 
stanzas which he composed on his fair companion of the 
harvest-field, out of whose hands he loved to remove the 
nettle-stings and the thistles : the prettier song, be- 



80 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

gmning "Now wastlin win's and slaughtering guns," 
written on the lass of Kirkoswald, with whom, instead 
of learning mensuration, he chose to wander under the 
light of the moon : a strain better still, inspired by the 
charms of a neighboring maiden, of the name of Annie 
Ronald : another, of equal merit, arising out of his noc- 
turnal adventures among the lasses of the west : and, 
finally that crowning glory of all his lyric compositions, 
" Green grow the rashes." This little clasped book, 
however, seems not to have been made his confidante till 
his twenty-third "or twenty-fourth year : he probably 
admitted to its pages only the strains which he loved most, 
or such as had taken a place in his memory : at whatever 
age it was commenced, he had then begun to estimate his 
own character, and intimate his fortunes, for he calls him- 
self in its pages " a man who had little art in making 
money, and still less in keeping it." 

We have not been told how welcome the incense of 
his songs rendered him to the rustic maidens of Kyle : 
women are not apt to be won by the charms of verse ; 
they have little sympathy with dreamers on Parnassus, 
and allow themselves to be influenced by something more 
substantial than the roses and lilies of the muse. Burns 
had other claims to their regard than those arising from 
poetic skill : he was tall, young, good-looking, with dark, 
bright eyes, and words and wit at will : he had a sarcas- 
tic sally for all lads who presumed to cross his path, and 
a soft, persuasive word for all lasses on whom he fixed 
his fancy : nor was this all — he was adventurous and bold 
in love trystes and love excursions : long, rough roads, 
stormy nights, flooded rivers, and lonesome places were 
no letts to him ; and when the dangers or labors of the 
way were braved, he was alike skilful in eluding vigilant 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 81 

I 

aunts, wakerife mothers, and envious or suspicious sisters : 
for rivals he had a blow as ready as he had a word, and 
was familiar with snug stack-yards, broomy glens, and 
nooks of hawthorn and honeysuckle, where maidens love 
to be wooed. This rendered him dearer to woman's 
heart than all the lyric effusions of his fancy ; and when 
we add to such allurements, a warm, flowing, and persua- 
sive eloquence, we need not wonder that woman listened 
and was won ; that one of the most charming damsels of the 
West said, an hour with him in the dark was worth a life- 
time of light with any other body ; or that the accomplish- 
ed and beautiful Duchess of Gordon declared, in a latter 
day, that no man ever carried her so completely off her 
feet as Robert Bums. 

It is one of the delusions of the poet's critics and 
biographers, that the sources of his inspiration are to be 
found in the great classic poets of the land, with some of 
whom he had from his youth been familiar : there is little 
or no trace of them in any of his compositions. He read 
and wondered — he warmed his fancy at their flame, he 
corrected his own natural taste by theirs, but he neither 
copied nor imitated, and there are but two or three allu- 
sions to Young and Shakspeare in all the range of his 
verse. , He could not but feel that he was the scholar of 
a different school, and that his thirst was to be slaked at 
other fountains. The language in which those great bards 
embodied their thoughts was unapproachable to an Ayr- 
shire peasant ; it was to him as an almost foreign tongue ; 
he had to think and feel in the not ungraceful or inharmo- 
nious language of his own vale, and then, in a manner, 
translate it into that of Pope or of Thomson, with the 
additional difficulty of finding English words to express 
the exact meaning of those of Scotland, which had chiefly 



82 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

been retained because equivalents could not be found in 
the more elegant and grammatical tongue. Such strains 
as those of the polished Pope or the sublimer Milton were 
beyond his power, less from deficiency of genius than 
from lack of language : he could, indeed, write English 
with ease and fluency ; but when he desired to be tender 
or impassioned, to persuade or subdue, he had recourse 
to the Scottish, and he found it sufficient. 

The goddesses or the Dalilahs of the young poet's song 
were, like the language in which he celebrated them, the 
produce of the district ; not dames high and exalted, but 
lasses of the barn and of the byre, who had never been 
in higher company than that of shepherds or ploughmen, 
or danced in a politer assembly than that of their fellow- 
peasants, on a barn-floor, to the sound of the district 
fiddle. Nor even of these did he choose the loveliest to 
lay out the wealth of his verse upon : he has been accused, 
by his brother among others, of lavishing the colors of his 
fancy on very ordinai^y faces. " He had always," says 
Gilbert, *' a jealousy of people who were richer than him- 
self; his love, therefore, seldom settled on persons of this 
description. When he selected any one, out of the 
sovereignty of his good pleasure, to whom he should pay 
his particular attention, she was instantly invested with a 
sufficient stock of charms out of the plentiful Stores of his 
own imagination : and there was often a great dissimili- 
tude between his fair captivator, as she appeared to others 
and as she seemed when invested with the attributes he 
gave her." " My heart," he himself, speaking of those 
days, observes, ** was completely tinder, and was eternally 
lighted up by some goddess or other." Yet, it must be 
acknowledged that sufficient room exists for believing that 
Burns and his brethren of the West had very different 



LIFE OF ROBERT JBl/RNS. S3 

notions of the captivating and the beautiful ; while they 
were moved by rosy cheeks and looks of rustic health, he 
was moved, like a sculptor, by beauty of form or by har- 
mony of motion, and by expression, which lightened up 
ordinary features and rendered them captivating. Such, 
I have been told, were several of the lasses of the West, 
to whom, if he did not surrender his heart, he rendered 
homage ; and both elegance of form and beauty of face 
were visible to all in those of whom he afterwards sang 
— the Hamiltons and the Burnets of Edinburgh, and the 
Millers and M'Murdos of the Nith. 

The mind of Burns took now a wider range : he had 
sung of the maidens of Kyle in strains not likely soon to 
die, and though not weary of the softnesses of love, he 
desired to try his genius on matters of a sterner kind — 
w'hat those subjects were he tells us ; they were homely 
and at hand, of a native nature and of Scottish growth : 
places celebrated in Roman story, vales made famous in 
G-recian song — hills of vines and groves of myrtle had 
few charms for him. " I am hurt," thus he writes in 
August, 1785, " to see other towns, rivers, woods, and 
haughs of Scotland immortalized in song, while my dear 
native county, the ancient Baillieries of Carrick, Kyle 
and Cunningham, famous in both ancient and modem 
times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabitants — a 
county where civil and religious liberty have ever found 
their first support and their asylum — a county, the birth- 
place of many famous philosophers, soldiers, and states- 
men, and the scene of many great events recorded in 
history, particularly the actions of the glorious Wallace — 
yet we have never had one Scotch poet of any eminence 
to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic wood- 
lands and sequestered scenes of Ayr, and the mountainous 



84 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

source and winding sweep of the Doon, emulate Tay, 
Forth, Ettrick and Tweed. This is a complaint I would 
gladly remedy, but, alas ! I am far unequal to the task, 
both in genius and education." To fill up with glowing 
verse the outline which this sketch indicates, was to raise 
the long-laid spirit of national song — to waken a strain 
to which the whole land would yield response — a miracle 
unattempted — certainly unperformed — since the days 
of the Gentle Shepherd. It is true that the tongue of the 
muse had at no time been wholly silent ; that now and 
then a burst of sublime wo, like the song of " Mary, weep 
no more for me," and of lasting merriment and humor, 
like that of *' Tibbie Fowler," proved that the fire of 
natural poesie smouldered, if it did not blaze ; while the 
social strains of the unfortunate Ferguson revived in the 
city, if not in the field, the memory of him who sang the 
*' Monk and the Miller's wife." But notwithstanding 
these and other productions of equal merit, Scottish poesie, 
it must be owned, had lost much of its original ecstacy 
and fervor, and that the boldest efforts of the muse no 
more equalled the songs of Dunbar, of Douglas, of 
Lyndsay, and of James the Fifth, than the sound of an 
artificial cascade resembles the undying thunders of Corra. 
To accomplish this required an acquaintance with man 
beyond what the forge, the change-house, and the market- 
place of the village supplied ; a look further than the 
barn-yard and the furrowed field, and a livelier knowledge 
and deeper feeling of history than, probably. Burns ever 
possessed. To all ready and accessible sources of know- 
ledge he appears to have had recourse ; he sought matter 
for his muse in the meetings, religious as well as social, of 
the district — consorted with staid matrons, grave plod- 
ding farmers — with those who preached as well as those 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS, 85 

who listened — with sharp-tongued attorneys, who laid 
down the law over a Mauchline gill — with country 
squires, whose wisdom was great in the game-laws, and 
in contested elections — and with roving smugglers, who 
at that time hung, as a cloud, on all the western coast of 
Scotland. In the company of farmers and fellow-peasants, 
he witnessed scenes which he loved to embody in verse, 
saw pictures of peace and joy, now woven into the web of 
his song, and had a poetic impulse given to him both by 
cottage devotion and cottage meniment. If he was fa- 
miliar with love and all its outgoings and incomings — 
had met his lass in the midnight shade, or walked with 
her under the moon, or braved a stormy night and a haunt- 
ed road for her sake — he was as well acquainted with 
the joys which belong to social intercourse, when instru- 
ments of music speak to the feet, when the reek of punch- 
bowls gives a tongue to the staid and demure, and bridal 
festivity, and harvest-homes, bid a whole valley lift up its 
voice and be glad. It is more difficult to decide what 
poetic use he could make of his intercourse with that 
loose and lawless class of men, who, from love of gain, 
broke the laws and braved the police of their country : 
that he found among smugglers, as he says, **' men of no- 
ble virtues, magnanimity, generosity, disinterested fi'iend- 
ship, and modesty," is easier to believe than that he 
escaped the contamination of their sensual manners and 
prodigality. The people of Kyle regarded this conduct 
with suspicion : they were not to be expected to know that 
when Bums ranted and boused with smugglers, conversed 
with tinkers huddled in a kiln, or listened to the riotous 
mirth of a batch of "randie gangrel bodies" as they "toom- 
edtheirpowks and pawned their duds," for liquorinPoosy 
Nansie's, he was taking sketches for the future entertain- 
8 



86 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

ment and instruction of the world ; they coulU not foresee 
that from all this moral strength and poetic yeauty would 
arise. 

While meditating something better than a ballad to 
his mistress's eyebrow, he did not neglect to lay out the 
little skill he had in cultivating the grounds of Mossgiel. 
The prosperity in which he found himself in the first 
and second seasons, induced him to hope that good for- 
tune had not yet forsaken him : a genial summer and a 
good market seldom come together to the farmer, but at 
first they came to Bums ; and to show that he was wor- 
thy of them, he bought books on agriculture, calculated 
rotation of crops, attended sales, held the plough with 
diligence, used the scythe, the reap-hook, and the flail, 
with skill, and the malicious even began to say that there 
was something more in him than wild sallies of wit and 
foolish rhymes. But the farm lay high, the bottom was 
wet, and in a third season, indifferent seed and a wet har- 
vest robbed him at once of half his crop ; he seems to 
have regarded this as an intimation from above, that 
nothing which he undertook would prosper : and consoled 
himself with joyous friends and with the society of the 
muse. The judgment cannot be praised which selected 
a farm with a wet cold bottom, and sowed it with unsound 
iseed ; but that man who despairs because a wet season 
robs him of the fruits of his field, is unfit for the warfare 
of life, where, fortitude is as much required as by a gene- 
ral on a field of battle, when the tide of success threatens 
to flow against Mm. The poet seems to have believed, 
very early in life, that he was none of the elect of Mam- 
mon; that he was too much of a genius ever to acquire 
wealth by steady labor, or by, as he loved to call it, gin- 
horse prudence, or giubbing industry. 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 87 

And yet 'here were hours and days in which Burns, 
even when t.'e rain fell on his unhoused sheaves, did not 
wholly despair of himself: he labored, nay sometimes 
he slaved on his farm ; and at intervals of toil, sought to 
embellish his mind with such knowledge as might be 
useful, should chance, the goddess who ruled his lot, 
drop him upon some of the higher places of the land. 
He had, while he lived at Tarbolton, united with some 
half-dozen young men, all sons of farmers in that neigh- 
borhood, in forming a club, of which the object was to 
charm away a few evening hours in the week with agree- 
able chit-chat, and the discussion of topics of economy or 
love. Of this little society the poet was president, and the 
first question they were called on to settle was this, " Sup- 
pose a young man bred a farmer, but without any fortune, 
has it in his power to marry either of two women ; the 
one a girl of large fortune, but neither handsome in per- 
son, nor agreeable in conversation, but who can manage 
the household affairs of a fanu well enough ; the other of 
them, a girl every way agreeable in person, conversation, 
and behavior, but without any fortune, which of them 
shall he choose V This question was started by the 
poet, and once every week the club were called to the 
consideration of matters connected with rural life and in- 
dustry : their expenses were limited to threepence a 
week ; and till the departure of Burns to the distant Moss- 
giel, the club continued to live and thrive ; on his remo- 
val it lost the spirit which gave it birth, and was heard of 
no more ; but its aims and its usefulness were revived in 
Mauchline, where the poet was induced to establish a 
society which only differed from the other in spending 
the moderate fines arising from non-attendance, on books, 
instead of liquor. Here, too, Burns was the president, 



88 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

and the members were chiefly the sons of husbandmen, 
whom he found, he said, more natural in their manners, 
and more agreeable than the self-sufficient mechanics of 
villages and towns, who are ready to dispute on all topics, 
and inclined to be convinced on none. This club had 
the pleasure of subscribing for the first edition of the 
works of its great associate. ,It has been questioned by 
his first biographer, whether the refinement of mind, 
which follows the reading of books of eloquence and deli- 
cacy, — the mental improvement resulting from such calm 
discussions as the Tarbolton and Mauchline clubs indul- 
ged in, was not injurious to men engaged in the bai'n and 
at the plough. A well-ordered mind will be strength- 
ened, as well as embellished, by elegant knowledge, while 
over those naturally barren and ungenial all that is refined 
or noble will pass as a sunny shower scuds over lumps of 
granite, bringing neither warmth nor life. 

In the account which the poet gives to Moore of his 
early poems, he says little about his exquisite lyrics, and 
less about ** The Death and dying Words of Poor Mailie," 
or her " Elegy," the first of his poems where the inspira- 
tion of the muse is visible ; but he speaks with exultation 
of the fame which those indecorous sallies, *' Holy Willie's 
Prayer" and " The Holy Tulzie" brought from some of 
the clergy, and the people of Ayrshire. The west of 
Scotland is ever in the van, when matters either political 
or religious are agitated. Calvinism was shaken at this 
time, with a great controversy among its professors, of 
which it is enough to say, that while one party rigidly 
adhered to the word and letter of the Confession of Faith , 
and preached up the palmy and wholesome days of the 
Covenant, the other sought to soften the harsher rules and 
observances of the kirk, and to bring moderation and 



LIFE OF RODERT BURNS. 89 

charity into its discipline as well as its councils. Both 
believed themselves right, both were loud and hot, 
and personal, — bitter with a bitterness only known in 
religious controversy. The poet sided with the profes- 
sors of the New Light, as the more tolerant were 
called, and handled the professors of the Old Light, 
as the other party were named, with the most un- 
sparing severity. For this he had sufficient cause : 
— he had experienced the mercilessness of kirk dis- 
cipline, when his frailties caused him to visit the stool 
of repentance ; and moreover his friend Gavin Ha- 
milton, a writer in Mauchline, had been sharply cen- 
sured by the same authorities, for daring to gallop on 
Sundays. Moodie, of Ricarton,and Russel, of Kilmarnock, 
were the first who tasted of the poet's wrath. They, 
though professors of the Old Light, had quarrelled, and, 
it is added, fought : " The Holy Tulzie," which recorded, 
gave at the same time wings to the scandal ; while for 
" Holy Willie," an elder of Mauchline, and an austere 
and hollow pretender to righteousness, he reserved the 
fiercest of all his lampoons. In " Holy Willie's Prayer,'^ 
he lays a burning hand on the terrible doctrine of predes- 
tination : this is a satire, daring, personal, and profane. 
Willie claims praise in the singular, acknowledges folly 
in the plural, and makes heaven accountable for his sins ! 
In a similar strain of undevout satire- he congratulates 
Goudie, of Kilmarnock, on his Essays on Revealed Reli- 
gion. These poems, particularly the two latter, are the 
sharpest lampoons in the language. 

While drudging in the cause of the New Light contro- 
versialists. Burns was not unconsciously strengthening his 
hands for worthier toils : the applause which selfish divines 
bestowed on his witty, but graceless efiusions, could not 
S* 



90 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

be enough for one who knew how fleeting the fame was 
which came from the heat of party disputes ; nor was he 
insensible that songs of a beauty unknown for a century 
to national poesie, had been unregarded in the hue and 
cry which arose on account of " Holy "Willie's Prayer" 
and "^The Holy Tulzie." He hesitated to drink longer 
out of the agitated puddle of Calvinistic controversy, he 
resolved to slake his thirst at the pure well-springs of 
patriot feeling and domestic love ; and accordingly, in the 
last and best of his controversial compositions, he rose 
out of the lower regions of lampoon into the upper air 
of true poetry. *' The Holy Fair," though stained in one 
or two verses with personalities, exhibits a scene glowing 
with character and incident and life : the aim of the poem 
is not so much to satirize one or two Old Light divines, 
as to expose and rebuke those almost indecent festivities, 
which in too many of the western parishes accompanied 
the administration of the sacrament. In the earlier days 
of the church, when men were staid and sincere, it was, 
no doubt, an impressive sight to see rank succeeding rank, 
of the old and the young, all calm and all devout, seated 
before the tent of the preacher, in the sunny houis of 
June, listening to his eloquence, or partaking of the mystic 
bread and wine ; but in these our latter days, when disci- 
pline is relaxed, along with the sedate and the pious come 
swarms of the idle and the profligate, whom no eloquence 
can edify and no solemn rite affect. On these, and such 
as these, the poet has poured his satire ; and since this 
desirable reprehension the Holy Fairs, east as well as 
west, have become more decorous, if not more devout. 

His controversial sallies were accompanied, or followed, 
by a series of poems which showed that national character 
and manners, as Lockhart has truly and happily said, 



LIFE OF ROBERT EURXS. 91 

were once more in the hands of a national poet. These 
compositions are both numerous and various : they record 
the poet's own experience and emotions ; they exhibit 
the highest moral feeling, the purest patriotic sentiments, 
and a deep sympathy with the fortunes, both here and 
hereafter, of his fellow-men ; they delineate domestic 
manners, man's stern as well as social hours, and mingle 
the serious with the joyous, the sarcastic with the solemn, 
the mournful with the pathetic, the amiable with the gay, 
and all with an ease and an unaffected force and freedom 
known only to the genius of Shakspeare, In " The Twa 
Dogs" he seeks to reconcile the laborer to his lot, and 
intimates, by examples drawn from the hall as well as the 
cottage, that happiness resides in the humblest abodes, 
and is even partial to the clouted shoe. In *' Scotch 
Drink" he excites man to love his country, by precepts 
both heroic and social ; and proves that while wine and 
brandy are the tipple of slaves, whiskey and ale are the 
drink of the free ; sentiments of a similar kind distinguish 
his " Earnest Cry and Prayer to the Scotch Representa- 
tives in the House of Commons," each of whom he exhorts 
by name to defend the remaining liberties and immunities 
of his country. A higher tone distinguishes the " Address 
to the Deil :" he records all the names, and some of them 
are strange ones ; and all the acts, and some of them 
are as whimsical as they are terrible, of this far kenned 
and noted personage ; to these he adds some of the fiend's 
doings as they stand in Scripture, together with his own 
experiences ; and concludes by a hope, as unexpected as 
merciful and relenting, that Satan may not be exposed to 
an eternity of torments. " The Dream" is a humorous 
sally, and may be almost regarded as pro^^hetic. The 
poet feigns himself present, in slumber, at the Royal 



92 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

birth-day ; and supposes that he addresses his majesty, on 
his household matters as well as the affairs of the nation. 
Some of the princes, it has been satirically hinted, behaved 
afterwards in such a way as if they wished that the scrip- 
ture of the Burns should be fulfilled : in this strain he has 
imitated the license and equalled the wit of some of the 
elder Scottish Poets. 

" The Vision" is wholly serious; it exhibits the poet 
in one of those fits of desj^ondency which the dull, who 
have no misgivings, never know : he dwells with sarcastic 
bitterness on the opportunities which, for the sake of 
song, he has neglected of becoming wealthy, and is draw- 
ing a sad parallel between rags and riches, when the 
muse steps in and cheers his despondency, by assuring 
him of undying fame. " Halloween" is a strain of a more 
homely kind, recording the superstitious beliefs, and no 
less superstitious doings of old Scotland, on that night, 
when witches and elves and evil spirits are let loose among 
the children of men : it reaches far back into manners 
and customs, and is a picture, curious and valuable. The 
tastes and feelings of husbandmen inspired " The old 
Farmer's Address to his old mare Maggie," which exhibits 
some jDleasing recollections of his days of courtship and 
hours of sociality. The calm, tranquil picture of house- 
hold happiness and devotion in " The Cotter's Saturday 
Night," has induced Hogg, among others, to believe that 
it has less than usual of the spirit of the poet, but it has 
all the spirit that was required ; the toil of the week has 
ceased, the laborer has returned to his well-ordered home 
— his " cozie ingle and his clean hearth-stane," — and 
with his wife and children beside him, turns his thoughts 
to the praise of that God to whom he owes all : this he 
performs with a reverence and an awe, at once natural, 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 93 

national, and poetic. " The Mouse" is a brief and happy 
and very moving poem : happy, for it delineates, with 
w^onderful truth and life, the agitation of the mouse when 
the coulter broke into its abode, and moving, for the poet 
takes the lesson of ruin to himself, and feels the present 
and dreads the future. " The Mountain Daisy," once, 
more properly, called by Bums " The Go wan," resembles 
*' The Mouse" in incident and moral, and is equally happy, 
in language and conception. " The Lament" is a dark, 
and all but tragic page, from the poet's own life. " Man 
was made to Mourn" takes the part of the humble and 
the homeless, against the coldness and selfishness of the 
wealthy and the powerful, a favorite topic of meditation 
with Burns. He refrained, for awhile, from making 
" Death and Doctor Hornbook" public ; a poem which 
deviates from the offensiveness of personal satire, into a 
strain of humor, at once airy and original. 

His epistles in verse may be reckoned amongst his hap- 
piest productions : they are written in all moods of mind, 
and are, by turns, lively and sad ; careless and serious ; — 
now giving advice, then taking it ; laughing at learning, 
and lamenting its want ; scoffing at propriety and wealth ; 
yet admitting, that without the one he cannot be wise, nor 
wanting the other, independent, The Epistle to David 
Sillar is the first of these compositions : the poet has no 
news to tell, and no serious question to ask : he has only 
to communicate his own emotions of joy, or of sorrow, and 
these he relates and discusses with singular elegance as well 
as ease, twining, at the same time, into the fabric of his com- 
position, agreeable allusions to the taste and affections of 
his correspondent. He seems to have rated the intellect 
of Sillar as the highest amongst his rustic friends : he pays 
him more deference, and addresses him in a higher vein than 



94 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

he observes to others. The Epistles to Lapraik, to Smith, 
and to Rankine, are in a more famihar, or social mood, 
and lift the veil from the darkness of the poet's condition, 
and exhibit a mind of first-rate power, groping, and that 
surely, its way to distinction, in spite of humility of birth, 
obscurity of condition, and the coldness of the wealthy or 
the titled. The epistles of other poets owe some of their 
fame to the rank or the reputation of those to whom they 
are addressed; those of Burns are written, one and all, 
to nameless and undistinguished men. Sillar was a coun- 
try schoolmaster, Lapraik a moorland laird. Smith a small 
shop-keeper, and Rankine a farmer, who loved a gill and 
a joke. Yet these men were the chief friends, the only 
literary associates of the poet, during those early years, 
in which, with some exceptions, his finest works were 
written. 

Bums, while he was writing the poems, the chief of 
which we have named, was a laboring husbandman on 
the little farm of Mossgiel, a pursuit which affords but few 
leisure hours for either reading or jDondering ; but to him 
the stubble-field was musing-ground, and the walk behind 
the plough, a twilight saunter on Parnassus. As, with a 
careful hand and a steady eye, he guided his horses, and 
saw an evenly furrow turned up by the share, his thoughts 
were on other themes ; he was straying in haunted glens, 
when Spirits have power — looking in fancy on the lasses 
" skelping barefoot," in silks and in scarlets, to a field- 
jDreaching — walking in imagination with the rosie widow, 
who on Halloween ventured to dip her left sleeve in the 
burn where three lairds' lands met — makinor the " bottle 

o 

clunk," with joyous smugglers, on a lucky run of gin or 
brandy — or if his thoughts at all approached his acts — 
he was moralizing on the daisy oppressed- by the furrow 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 95 

which his own plough-share had turned. That his thoughts 
were thus wandering we have his own testimony, with 
that of his brother Gilbert; and were both wanting, the 
certainty that he composed the greater part of his immor- 
tal poems in two years, from the summer of 1784 to the 
summer of 1786, would be evidence sufficient. The muse 
must have been strong vsdthin him, when, in spite of the 
rains and sleets of the "ever-dropping west" — when in 
defiance of the hot and sweaty brows occasioned by reap- 
ing and thrashing — declining markets, and showery \\/ 
vests — the clamor of his laird for his rent, anc^/'v'^j 
tradesman for his account, he persevered in song, 
sought solace in verse, when all other solace was deni 
him. 

The circumstances under which his principal jDoems 
were composed, have been related : the *' Lament of 
Mailie" found its origin in the catastrophe of a pet ewe ; 
the " Epistle to Sillar" was confided by the poet to his 
brother while they were engaged in weeding the kale- 
yard ; the ** Address to the Deil" was suggested by the 
many strange portraits which belief or fear had drawn of 
Satan, and was repeated by the one brother to the other, 
on the way with their carts to the kiln, for lime ; the 
" Cotter's Saturday Night" originated in the reverence 
with which the worship of God was conducted in the 
family of the poet's father, and in the solemn tone with 
which he desired his children to compose themselves for 
praise and prayer; " the Mouse," and its moral compa- 
nion " the Daisy," were the offspring of the incidents 
which they relate : and " Death and Doctor Hornbook" 
was conceived at a freemason-meeting, where the hero of 
the piece had shown too much of the pedant, and com- 
posed on his way home, after midnight, by the poet, while 



96 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

his head was somewhat dizzy with drink. One of the 
most remarkable of his compositions, the " Jolly Beggars," 
a drama, to which nothing in the language of either the 
North or South can be compared, and which was unknown 
till after the death of the author, was suggested by a scene 
which he saw in a low ale-house, into which, on a Satur- 
day-night, most of the sturdy beggars of the district had 
met to sell their meal, pledge their supei-fluous rags, and 
drink their gains. It may be added, that he loved to walk 
in solitary spots ; that his chief musing-ground was the 
^ banks of the Ayr ; the season most congenial to his fancy 
f winter, when the winds were heard in the leafless 
ods, and the voice of the swollen streams came from 
ie and hill ; and that he seldom composed a whole poem 
at once, but satisfied with a few fervent verses, laid the 
subject aside, till "the muse summoned him to another 
exertion of fancy. In a little back closet, still existing in 
the farm-house of Mossgiel, he committed most of his 
poems to paper. 

But while the poet rose, the farmer sank. It was not \ 
the cold clayey bottom of his ground, nor the j^urchase of • 
unsound seed-corn, nor the fluctuation in the markets 
alone, which injured him : neither was it the taste for 
freemason socialities, nor a desire to join the mirth of 
comrades, either of the sea or the shore ; neither could it 
be wholly imputed to his passionate following of the 
softer sex — indulgence in the " illicit rove," or giving^ 
way to his eloquence at the feet of one whom he lovec^ 
and honored; other farmers indulged in the one, or suffered 
from the other, yet were prosperous. His want of success 
\ arose from other causes ; his heart was not with his task, 
.save by fits and starts : he felt he was designed for higher 
purposes than ploughing, and harrowing, and sowing, 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 97 

and reaping : when the sun called on him, after a shower, 
to come to the plough, or when the ripe corn invited the 
sickle, or the ready market called for the measured grain, 
the poet was under other spells, and was slow to avail 
himself of those golden moments, which come but once in 
the season. To this may be added, a too superficial 
knowledge of the art of farming, and a want of intimacy 
with the nature of the soil he was called to cultivate. He 
could speak fluently of leas, and faughs, and fallows, of 
change of seed, and rotation of crops, but practical 
knowledge and application w^ere required, and in these 
Burns was deficient. The moderate gain which those 
dark days of agriculture brought to the economical farmer, 
was not obtained : the close, the all but niggardly care by 
which he could win and keep his crown-pieces, — gold 
was seldom in the farmer's hand, — was either above or 
below the mind of the poet ; and Mossgiel, which, in the 
hands of an assiduous farmer, might have made a reason- 
able return for labor, was unproductive, under one who 
had little skill, less economy, and no taste for the task. 

Other reasons for his failure have been assigned. It is 
to the credit of the moral sentiments of the husbandmen 
of Scotland, that when one of their class forgets what 
virtue requires, and dishonors, without reparation, even 
the humblest of the maidens, he is not allowed to go 
unpunished. No proceedings take place, perhaps one 
hard word is not spoken ; but he is regarded with loathing 
by the old and the devout ; he is looked on by all with 
cold and reproachful eyes — sorrow is foretold as his lot, 
sure disaster as his fortune ; and if these chance to arrive, 
the only sympathy expressed is, " "What better could he 
expect 1" Something of this sort befell Burns : he had 
already satisfied the kirk in the matter of ** Sonsie, smirk- 
9 



98 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

ing, dear-bought Bess," his daughter, by one of his moth- 
er's maids ; and now, to use his own words, he was 
brought within point-blank of the heaviest metal of the 
kirk by a similar folly. The . fair transgressor, both for 
her father's sake and her own youth, had a large share 
of public sympathy. Jean Armour, for it is of her I 
speak, was in her eighteenth year ; with dark eyes, a 
handsome foot, and a melodious tongue, she made her 
way to the poet's heart — and, as their stations in life 
were equal, it seemed that they had only to be satisfied 
themselves to render their union easy. But her father, in 
addition to being a very devout man, was a zealot of the 
Old Light ; and Jean, dreading his resentment, was v/ill- 
ing, while she loved its unforgiven satirist, to love him in 
secret, in the hope that the time would come when she 
might safely avow it : she admitted the poet, therefore, to 
her company in lonesome places, and walks beneath the 
moon, where they both forgot themselves, and were at 
last obliged to own a private marriage as a protection 
from kirk censure. The professors of the Old Light 
rejoiced, since it brought a scoffing rhymer within reach 
of their hand; but her father felt a two-fold sorrow, 
because of the shame of a favorite daughter, and for 
having committed the folly with one both loose in conduct 
and profane of speech. He had cause to be angry, but 
his anger, through his zeal, became tyrannous : in the 
exercise of what he called a father's power, he compelled 
his child to renounce the poet as her husband and burn 
the marriage-lines ; for he regarded her marriage, without 
the kirk's permission, with a man so utterly cast away, as 
a worse crime than her folly. So blind is anger ! She 
could renounce neither her husband nor his offsj)ring in a 
lawful way, and in spite of the destruction of the marriage- 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 99 

lines, and renouncing the name of wife, she was as much 
Mrs. Burns as marriage could make her. No one con- 
cerned seemed to think so. Burns, who loved her tenderly, 
went all but mad when she renounced him : he gave up 
his share of Mossgiel to his brother, and roamed, moody 
and idle, about the land, with no better aim in life than a 
situation in one of our western sugar-isles, and a vague 
hope of distinction as a poet. 
/ How the distinction which he desired as a poet was to 
/ be obtained was, to a poor bard in a provincial place, a 
V sore puzzle : there were no enterprising booksellers in 
f\ the western land, and it was not to be expected that the 
\ printers of either Kilmarnock or Paisley had money to 
\expend on a speculation in rhyme : it is much to the honor 
6f his native county that the publication which he wished 
for was at last made easy. The best of his poems, in his 
own hand-writing, had found their way into the hands of 
the Ballantynes, Hamiltons, Parkers, and Mackenzies, 
and were much admired, Mrs. Stewart, of Stair and 
Afton, a lady of distinction and taste, had made, acci- 
dentally, the acquaintance both of Burns and some of his 
songs, and was ready to befriend him ; and so favorable 
was the impression on all hands, that a subscription, suffi- 
cient to defray the outlay of paper and print, was soon 
filled up — one hundred copies being subscribed for by 
the Parkers alone. He soon arranged materials for a 
volume, and put them into the hands of a printer in Kil- 
marnock, the Wee Johnnie of one of his biting epigrams. 
Johnnie was startled at the unceremonious freedom of 
most of the pieces, and asked the poet to compose one of 
modest language and moral aim, to stand at the beginning, 
and excuse some of those free ones which followed : 
Bums, whose " Twa Dogs" was then incomplete, finished 



100 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

the poem at a sitting, and put it in the van, much to his 
printer's satisfaction. If the "Jolly Beggars" was omitted 
for any other cause than its freedom of sentiment and 
language, or " Death and Doctor Hornbook" from any 
other feeling than that of being too personal, the causes 
of their exclusion have remained a secret. It is less easy 
to account for the omission of many songs of high merit, 
which he had among his papers : perhaps he thought 
those which he selected were sufficient to test the taste of 
the public. Before he printed the whole, he, with the 
consent of his brother, altered his name from Burness to 
Bums, a change which, I am told, he in after years 
regretted. 

In the summer of the year 1786 the little volume, big 
with the hopes and fortunes of the bard, made its appear- 
ance : it was entitled simply, '* Poems, chiefly in the 
Scottish Dialect ; by Robert Burns ;" and accompanied 
by a modest preface, saying, that he submitted his book 
to his country with fear and with trembling, since it con- 
tained little of the art of poesie, and at the best was but 
a voice given, rude, he feared, and uncouth, to the loves, 
the hopes, and the fears of his own bosom. Had a summer 
sun risen on a winter morning it could not have surprised 
the Lowlands of Scotland more than this Kilmarnock 
volume surprised and delighted the people, one and all. 
The milkmaid sang his songs, the ploughman repeated 
his poems ; the old quoted both, and even the devout 
rejoiced that idle verse had at last mixed a tone of morality 
with its mirth. The volume penetrated even into Niths- 
dale. " Keep it out of the way of your children," said 
a Cameronian divine, when he lent it to my father, " lest 
ye find them, as I found mine, reading it on the Sabbath." 
No wonder that such a volume made its way to the hearts 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 101 

of a peasantry whose taste in poetry has been the marvel 
of many writers : the poems were mostly on topics with 
which they were familiar : the language was that of the 
fireside, raised above the vulgarities of common life, by a 
purifying spirit of expression and the exalting fervor of 
inspiration : and there was such a brilliant and graceful 
mixture of the elegant and the homely, the lofty and the 
low, the familiar and the elevated, — such a rapid suc- 
cession of scenes which moved to tenderness or tears ; or 
to subdued mirth or open laughter — unlooked for allu- 
sions to scripture, or touches of sarcasm and scandal — of 
superstitions to scare, and of humor to delight — while 
through the whole was diffused, as the scent of flowers 
through summer air, a moral meaning — a sentimental 
beauty, which sweetened and sanctified all. The poet's 
expectations from this little venture were humble : he 
hoped as much money from it as would pay for his 
passage to the West Indies, where he proposed to enter 
into the service of some of the Scottish settlers, and help 
to manage the double mystery of sugar-making and 
slavery. 

The hearty applause which I have recorded came chiefly 
from the husbandman, the shepherd and the mechanic : 
the approbation of the magnates of the west, though not 
less warm, was longer in coming. Mrs. Stewart of Stair, 
indeed, commended the poems and cheered their author : 
Dugald Stewart received his visits with pleasure, and 
wondered at his vigor of conversation as much as at his 
muse : the door of the house of Hamilton was open to 
him, where the table was ever spread, and the hand ever 
ready to help : while the purses of the Ballantynes and 
the Parkers were always as open to him as were the 
doors of their houses. Those persons must be regarded 
9* 



102 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

as the real patrons of the poet : the high names of the 
district are not to be found among those who helped him 
with purse and patronage in 1786, that year of deep dis- 
tress and high,distinction. The Montgomeries came with 
their praise when his fame was up ; the Kennedys and 
the Bos wells were silent : and though the Cunninghams 
gave effectual aid, it was when the muse was crying with 
a loud voice before him, " Come all and see the man 
whom I delight to honor." It would be unjust as well as 
ungenerous not to mention the name of Mrs. Dunlop 
among the poet's best and early patrons : the distance at 
which she lived from Mossgiel had kept his name from 
her till his poems appeared ; but his works induced her 
to desire his acquaintance, and she became his warmest 
and surest friend. 

To say the truth. Burns endeavored in every honor- 
able way to obtain the notice of those who had influence 
in the land : he copied out the best of his unpublished 
poems in a fair hand, and inserting them in his printed 
volume, presented it to those who seemed slow to buy : he 
rewarded the notice of this one with a song — the atten- 
tions of that one with a sally of encomiastic verse : he 
left psalms of his own composing in the manse when he 
feasted with a divine : he enclosed *' Holy Willie's Pray- 
er," with an injunction to be grave, to one who loved 
mirth : he sent the " Holy Fair" to one whom he invited 
to drink a gill out of a mutchkin stoup, at Mauchline 
market ; and on accidentally meeting with Lord Daer, he 
immediately commemorated the event in a sally of verse, 
of a strain more free and yet as flattering as ever flowed 
from the lips of a court bard. "While musing over the 
names of those on whom fortune had smiled, yet who had 
neglected to smile on him, he remembered that he had 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 103 

met Miss Alexander, a young beauty of the west, in the 
walks of Ballochmyle ; and he recorded the impression 
which this fair vision made on him in a song of unequalled 
elegance and melody. He had met her in the woods in 
July, on the ISth of November he sent her the song, and 
reminded her of the circumstance from which it arose, in 
a letter which it is evident he had labored to render pol- 
ished and complimentary. The young lady took no notice 
of either the song or the poet, though willing, it is said, 
to hear of both now : — this seems to have been the last 
attempt he made on the taste or the sympathies of the 
gentry of his native district : for on the very day follow- 
ing we lind him busy in making arrangements for his depart- 
ure to Jamaica. 

For this step Burns had more than sufficient reasons : 
the profits of his volume amounted to little more than 
enough to waft him across the Atlantic : Wee Johnnie, 
though the edition was all sold, refused to risk another on 
speculation : his friends, both Ballantynes and Parkers, 
volunteered to relieve the printer's anxieties, but the poet 
declined their bounty, and gloomily indented himself in a 
ship about to sail from Greenock, and called on his muse 
to take farewell of Caledonia, in the last song he ever 
expected to measure in his native land. That fine lyric, 
beginning " The gloomy night is gathering fast," was the \ 
offspring of these moments of regret and sorrow. His 
feelings were not expressed in song alone : he remem- 
bered his mother and his natural daughter, and made an 
assignment of all that pertained to him at Mossgiel — 
and that was but little — and of all the advantage which 
a cruel, unjust, and insulting law allowed in the proceeds 
of his poems, for their support and behoof. This docu- 
ment was publicly read in the presence of the poet, at 



104 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

tlie market-cross of Ayr, by his friend William Chalmers, 
a notary public. Even this step was to Burns one of 
danger : some ill-advised person had uncoupled the mer- 
ciless pack of the law at his heels, and he was obliged to 
shelter himself as he best could, in woods, it is said, by 
day and in barns by night, till the final hour of his depart- 
ure came. That hour arrived, and his chest was on the 
way to the ship, when a letter was put into his hand which 
seemed to light him to brighter prospects. 

Among his friends whom his merits had procured him 
was Dr. Laurie, a district clergyman, who had taste 
enough to admire the deep sensibilities as well as the 
humor of the poet, and the generosity to make known 
both his w^orks and his worth to the warm-hearted and 
amiable Blacklock, who boldly proclaimed him a poet of 
the first rank, and lamented that he was not in Edinburgh 
to publish another edition of his poems. Burns was ever 
a man of impulse : he recalled his chest from G reenock ; 
he relinquished the situation he had accepted on the estate 
of one Douglas ; took a secret leave of hisp mother, and, 
without an introduction to any one, and unknown person- 
ally to all, save Dugald Stewart, away he walked, through 
Glenap, to Edinburgh, full of new hope and confiding in 
his genius. When he arrived, he scarcely knew what to 
do : he hesitated to call on the professor : he refrained 
from making himself known, as it has been supposed he 
did, to the enthusiastic Blacklock ; but, sitting down in 
an obscure lodging, he sought out an obscure printer, 
recommended by a humble comrade from Kyle, and 
began to negotiate for a new edition of the Poems of the 
Ayrshire Ploughman. This was not the w^ay to go about 
it : his barge had well nigh been shijj wrecked in the 
launch ; and he might have lived to regret the letter which 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 105 

hindered his voyage to Jamaica, had he not met by chance 
in the street a gentleman of the west, of the name of 
Dalzell, who introduced him to the Earl of Glencairn, a 
nobleman whose classic education did not- hurt his taste 
for Scottish poetry, and who was not too proud to lend 
his helping hand to a rustic stranger of such merit as 
Burns. Cunningham carried him to Creech, then the 
Murray of Edinburgh, a shrewd man of business, who 
opened the poet's eyes to his true interests : the first pro- 
posals, then all but issued, were put in the fire, and new 
ones printed and diffused over the island. The subscrip- 
tion was headed by half the noblemen of the north : the 
Caledonian Hunt, through the interest of Glencairn, took 
six hundred copies : duchesses and countesses swelled 
the list, and such a crowding to write down names had 
not been witnessed since the signing of the solemn league 
and covenant. 

While the subscription-papers were filling and the new 
volume printing on a paper and in a type worthy of such 
high patronage, Burns remained in Edinburgh, where, for 
the winter season, he was a lion, and one of an unwonted 
kind. Philosophers, historians, and scholars had shaken 
the elegant coteries of the city with their wit, or enlight- 
ened them with their learning, but they were all men who 
had been polished by polite letters or by intercourse with 
high life, and there was a sameness in their very dress as 
well as address, of which peers and peeresses had become 
weary. They therefore welcomed this rustic candidate 
for the honor of giving wings to their hours of lassitude 
and weariness, with a welcome more than common ; and 
when his approach was announced, the polished circle 
looked for the advent of a lout from the plough, in whose 
uncouth manners and embarrassed address they might 



106 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

find matter both for mirth and wonder. But they met 
with a barbarian who was not at all barbarous : as the 
poet met in Lord Daer feelings and sentiments as natural 
as those of a ploughman, so they met in a ploughman 
manners v/orthy of a lord : his air was easy and unper- 
plexed : his address was perfectly well-bred, and elegant 
in its simplicity : he felt neither eclipsed by the titled nor 
struck dumb before the learned and the eloquent, but took 
his station with the ease and Q^race of one born to it. In 

o 

the society of men alone he spoke out : he spared neither 
his wit, his humor, nor his sarcasm — he seemed to say 
to all — "I am a man, and you are no more; and why 
should I not act and speak like one 1" — it was remarked, 
however, that he had not learnt, or did not desire, to con- 
ceal his emotions — that he commended with more rapture 
than was courteous, and contradicted with more bluntness 
than was accounted polite. It was thus with him in the com- 
pany of men : when woman approached, his look altered, 
his eye beamed milder ; all that was stern in his nature 
underwent a change, and he received them with defe- 
rence, but with a consciousness that he could win their 
attention as he had won that of others who differed, indeed , 
from them only in the texture of their kirtles. This 
natural power of rendering himself acceptable to woman 
had been observed and envied by Sillar, one of the dear- 
est of his early comrades ; and it stood him in good stead 
now, when he was the object to whom the Duchess of 
Grordon, the loveliest as well as the wittiest of women — 
directed her discourse. Burns, she afterwards said, won 
the attention of the Edinburgh ladies by a deferential 
way of address — by an ease and natural gi'ace of man- 
ners, as new as it was unexpected — that he told them 
the stories of some of his tenderest son^s or liveliest 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 107 

poems in a style quite magical — enriching his little nar- 
ratives, which had one and all the merit of being short, 
with personal incidents of humor or of pathos. 

In a party, when Dr. Blair and Professor Walker were 
present, Burns related the circumstances under which he 
had composed his melancholy song, " The gloomy night is 
gathering fast," in a way even more touching than the 
verses : and in the company of the ruling beauties of the 
time, he hesitated not to lift the veil from some of the 
tenderer parts of his own history, and give them glim^^ses 
of the romance of rustic life. A lady of birth — one of \ 
his most willing listeners — used, I am told, to say, that f 
she should never forget the tale which he related of his 
affection for Mary Campbell, his Highland Mary, as he 
loved to call her. She was fair, he said, and affectionate, 
and as guileless as she was beautiful ; and beautiful he 
thought her in a very high degree. The first time he saw 
her was during one of his musing walks in the woods of 
Montgomery Castle ; and the first time he spoke to her 
was during the merriment of a harvest-kirn. There were 
others there who admired her, but he addressed her, and 
had the luck to win her regard from them all. He soon 
found that she was the lass whom he had long sought, but 
never before found — that her good looks were surpassed by 
her good sense ; and her good sense was equalled by her 
discretion and modesty. He met her frequently : she saw 
by his looks that he was sincere ; she put full trust in his 
"love, and used to wander with him among the green 
knowes and stream-banks till the sun went down and the 
moon rose, talking, dreaming of love and the golden days 
which awaited them. He was poor, and she had only her 
half-year's fee, for she was in the condition of a servant ; 
but thoughts of gear never darkened their dream ; they 



108 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

resolved to wed, and exchanged vows of constancy and 
love. They plighted their vows on the Sabbath to render 
them more sacred — they made them by a bum, where 
they had courted, that open nature might be a witness — ^ 
they made them over an open Bible, to show that they 
thought of God in this mutual act — and when they had 
done they both took water in their hands, and scattered it 
in the air, to intimate that as the stream was pure so were 
their intentions. They parted when they did this, but 
they parted never to meet more : she died in a burning 
fever, during a visit to her relations to prepare for her mar- 
riage ; and all that he had of her was a lock of her long 
bright hair, and her Bible, which she exchanged for his. 

Even with the tales which he related of rustic love and 
adventure his own story mingled; and ladies of rank heard, 
for the first time, that in all that was romantic in the pas- 
sion of love, and in all that was chivalrous in sentiment, 
,men of distinction, both by education and birth, were at 
least equalled by the peasantry of the land. They 
listened with interest, and inclined their feathers beside 
the bard, to hear Jiow love went on in the west, and in no 
case it ran quite smooth. Sometimes young hearts were 
kept asunder by the sordid feelings of parents, who could 
not be persuaded to bestow their daughter, perhaps an 
only one, on a wooer who could n'ot count penny for 
penny, and number cow for cow : sometimes a mother 
desired her daughter to look higher than to one of her sta- 
tion ; for her beauty and her education entitled her to match 
among the lairds, rather than the tenants ; and sometimes, 
the devotional tastes of both father and mother, approving 
of personal looks and connexions, were averse to see a 
daughter bestow her hand on one, whose language in 
religion was indiscreet, and whose morals were suspected. 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 109 

Yet, neither the vigilance of fathers, nor the suspicious 
care of aunts and mothers, could succeed in keeping those 
asunder whose hearts were together ; but in these meet- 
ings, circumspection and invention were necessary ; all 
fears were to be lulled by the seeming carelessness of the 
lass, — all perils were to be met and braved by the spirit 
of the lad. His home, perhaps, was at a distance, and 
he had wild woods to come through, and deep streams to 
pass, before he could see the signal-light, now shown and 
now withdrawn, at her window ; he had to approach with 
a quick eye and a wary foot, lest a father or a brother 
should see, and deter him : he had sometimes to wish for 
a cloud upon the moon, whose light, welcome to him on 
his way in the distance, was likely to betray him when 
near ; and he not unfrequently reckoned a wild night of 
wind and rain as a blessing, since it helped to conceal his 
coming, and proved to his mistress that he was ready to 
brave all for her sake. Of rivals met and baffled; of half- 
willing and half-unconsenting maidens, persuaded and 
won ; of the light-hearted and the careless becoming 
affectionate and tender ; and the coy, the proud, and the 
satiric being gained by " persuasive words, and more per- 
suasive sighs," as dames had been gained of old, he had 
tales enow. The ladies listened, and smiled at the tender 
narratives of the poet. 

Of his apppearance among the sons as well as the 
daughters of men, we have the account of Dugald Stew- 
art. " Burns," says the philosopher, " came to Edinburgh 
early in the winter : the attentions which he received 
from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as 
would have turned any head but his own. He retained 
the same simplicity of manners and appearance which 
had struck me so forcibly when I first saw him in the 
10 



110 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

country : his dress was suited to his station ; plain and 
unpretending, with sufficient attention to neatness : he 
always wore boots, and when on more than usual cere- 
mony, buckskin breeches. His manners were manly, 
simple, and independent; strongly expressive of conscious 
genius and worth, but without any indication of forward- 
ness, arrogance, or vanity. He took his share in conver- 
sation, but not more than belonged to him, and listened 
with apparent deference on subjects where his want of 
education deprived him of the means of information. If 
there had been a little more of gentleness and accommo- 
dation in his temper, he would have been still more inte- 
resting; but he had been accustomed to give law in the 
circle of his ordinary acquaintance, and his dread of any 
thing approaching to meanness or servility, rendered his 
manner somehow decided and hard. Nothing perhaps 
was more remarkable among his various attainments, than 
the fluency and precision and originality of language, 
when he spoke in company : more particularly as he 
aimed at purity in his turn of expression, and avoided 
more successfully than most Scotsmen, the peculiarities 
of Scottish phraseology. From his conversation I should 
have pronounced him to have been fitted to excel in 
whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his 
abilities. He was passionately fond of the beauties of 
nature, and I recollect he once told me, when I was ad- 
miring a distant prospect in one of our morning walks, that 
the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to 
his mind, which none could understand who had not wit- 
nessed, like himself, the happiness and worth which 
cottages contained." 

Such was the impression which Burns made at first on 
the fair, the titled, and the learned of Edinburgh ; an im- 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. Ill 

pressioii which, though lessened by intimacy and closer 
examination, on the part of men, remained unimpaired, 
on that of the softer sex, till his dying-day. His company, 
during the season of balls and festivities, continued to be 
courted by all who desired to be reckoned gay or polite. 
Cards of invitation fell thick on him ; he was not more 
welcome to the plumed and jewelled groups, whom her 
fascinating Grace of Cxordon gathered about her, than he 
was to the grave divines and polished scholars, who 
assembled in the rooms of Stewart, or Blair, or Robert- 
son. The classic socialities of Tytler, afterwards Lord 
Woodhouslee, or the elaborate supper-tables of the whim- 
sical Monboddo, whose guests imagined they were enter- 
tained in the manner of Lucullus or of Cicero, were not 
complete without the presence of the ploughman of Kyle ; 
and the feelings of the rustic poet, facing such companies, 
though of surprise and delight at first, gi'adually subsided 
he said, as he discerned that man differed from man only 
in the polish, and not in the grain. But Edinburgh offered 
tables and entertainers of a less orderly and staid charac- 
ter than those I have named — where the glass circulated 
with greater rapidity ; where the wit flowed more freely ; 
and where there were neither high-bred ladies to charm 
conversation within the bounds of modesty, nor serious 
philosophers, nor grave divines, to set a limit to the license 
of speech, or the hours of enjoyment. To these com- 
panions — and these were all of the better classes, the 
levities of the rustic poet's wit and humor were as wel- 
come as were the tenderest of his narratives to the 
accomplished Duchess of Gordon and the beautiful Miss 
Burnet of Monboddo : they raised a social roar not at all 
classic, and demanded and provoked his sallies of wild 
humor, or indecorous mirth, with as much delight as h^ 



112 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

had witnessed among the lads of Kyle, when at mill or 
forge, his humorous sallies abounded as the ale flowed. 
In these enjoyments the rough, but learned William 
Nicol, and the young and amiable Robert Ainslie shared : 
the name of the poet was coupled with those of profane 
wits, free livers, and that class of half-idle gentlemen who 
hang about the courts of law, or for a season or two wear 
the livery of Mars, and handle cold iron. 

Edinburgh had still another class of genteel convivial- 
ists, to whom the poet was attracted by principles as well 
as by pleasure ; these were the relics of that once nume- 
rous body, the Jacobites, who still loved to cherish the 
feelings of birth or education, rather than of judgment, 
and toasted the name of Stuart, when the last of the race 
had renounced his pretensions to a throne, for the sake of 
peace and the cross. Young men then, and high names 
were among them, annually met on the pretender's birth- 
day, and sang songs in which the white rose of Jacobitism 
flourished ; toasted toasts announcing adherence to the 
male line of the Bruce and the Stuart, and listened to the 
strains of the laureate of the day, who prophesied, in 
drink, the dismissal of the intrusive Hanoverian, by the 
right and might of the righteous and disinherited line. 
Burns, who was descended from a northern race, whose 
father was suspected of having drawn the claymore in 
1745, and who loved the blood of the Keith-Marishalls, 
under whose banners his ancestors had marched, readily 
united himself to a band in whose sentiments, political and 
social, he was a sharer. He was received with acclama- 
tion : the dignity of laureate was conferred upon him, and 
his inauguration ode, in which he recalled the names 
and the deeds of the Grahams, the Erskines, the Boyds, 
and the Gordons, was applauded for its fire, as well as 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 113 

for its sentiments. Yet though he ate and drank and 
sang with Jacobites, he was only, as far as sympathy and 
poesie went, of their number : his reason renounced the 
principles and the religion of the Stuart line j and though 
he shed a tear over their fallen fortunes — though he sym- 
pathized with the brave and honorable names that perished 
in their cause — though he cursed " the butcher, Cumber- 
land," and the bloody spirit which commanded the heads 
of the good and the heroic to be stuck where they would 
affright the passer-by, and pollute the air — he had no 
desire to see the splendid fabric of constitutional freedom, 
which the united genius of all parties had raised, thrown 
wantonly down. His Jacobitism influenced, not his head, 
but his heart, and gave a mournful hue to many of his 
lyric compositions. 

Meanwhile his poems were passing through the press. 
Burns made a few emendations of those pubHshed in the 
Kilmarnock edition, and he added others which, as he ex 
pressed it, he had carded and spun, since he passed Glen- 
buck. Some rather coarse lines were softened or omitted 
in the " Twa Dogs ;" others, from a change of his personal 
feelings, were made in the " Vision :" "Death and Doctor 
Hornbook," excluded before, was admitted now : the 
" Dream" was retained, in spite of the remonstrances of 
Mrs. Stewart, of Stair, and Mrs. Dunlop ; and the " Brigs 
of Ayr," in compliment to his patrons in his native dis- 
trict, and the " Address to Edinburgh," in honor of his 
titled and distinguished friends in that metropolis, were 
printed for the first time. He was unwilling to alter 
what' he had once printed : his friends, classic, titled, and 
rustic, found him stubborn and unpliable, in matters of 
criticism ; yet he was generally of a complimental mood : 
he loaded the robe of Coila in the *' Vision," with more 
10* 



114 LIFE OP ROBERT BURNS. 

scenes than it could well contain, that he might include 
in the landscape, all the country-seats of his friends, and 
he gave more than their share of commendation to the 
Wallaces, out of respect to his friend, Mrs. Dunlop. Of 
the critics of Edinburgh he said, they spun the thread of 
their criticisms so fine that it was unfit for either warp or 
weft ; and of its scholars, he said, they were never satis- 
fied with any Scottish poet, unless they could trace him 
in Horace. One moiTiing at Dr. Blair's breakfast-table, 
when the " Holy Fair" was the subject of conversation, 
the reverend critic said, " Why should 

' Moodie sped the holy door 

With tidings of salvation?* 

if you had said, with tidings of dainnation, the satire would 
have been the better, and the bitterer." " Excellent !" 
exclaimed the poet, *' the alteration is capital, and I hope 
you will honor me by allowing me to say in a note at 
whose suggestion it was made." Professor Walker, who 
tells the anecdote, adds that Blair evaded, with equal 
good humor and decision, this not very polite request ,* 
nor was this the only slip which the poet made on this 
occasion; some one asked him in which of the churches 
of Edinburgh he had received the highest gratification : 
he named the High-church, but gave the preference over 
all preachers to Robert Walker, the colleague and rival 
in eloquence of Dr. Blair himself, and that in a tone so 
pointed and decisive as to make all at the table stare and 
look embarrassed. The poet confessed afterwards that 
he never reflected on his blunder without pain and morti- 
fication. Blair probably had this in his mind, when, on 
reading the poem beginning " When Guildford good our 
pilot stood," he exclaimed, *' Ah ! the politics of Burns 



LIFE OP ROBERT BURNS. 115 

always smell of the smithy," meaning, that they were vul- 
gar and common. 

In April, the second or Edinburgh, edition was pub- 
lished : it was widely purchased, and was warmly com- 
mended. The country had been prepared for it by the 
generous and discriminating criticisms of Henry Macken- 
zie, published in that popular periodical, " The Lounger," 
where he says, ** Burns possesses the spirit as well as the 
fancy of a poet ; that honest pride and inde^Dendence of 
soul, which are sometimes the muse's only dower, break 
forth on every occasion, in his works." The praise of the 
author of the "Man of Feeling" was not more felt by 
Burns, than it was by the whole island; the harp of the 
north had not been swept for centuries by a hand so for- 
cible, and at the same time so varied, that it awakened 
every tone, whether of joy or wo : the language was that 
of rustic life ; the scenes of the poems were the dusty 
barn, the clay-floored reeky cottage, and the furrowed 
field ; and the characters were cowherds, ploughmen, and 
mechanics. The volume was embellished by a head of 
the poet, from the hand of the now venerable Alexander 
Nasmyth ; and introduced by a dedication to the noble- 
men and gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, in a style of 
vehement independence, unknown hitherto in the history 
of subscriptions. The whole work, verse, prose, and por- 
trait, won public attention, and kept it : and though some 
critics signified their displeasure at expressions which 
bordered on profanity, and at a license of language which 
they pronounced impure, by far the greater number uni- 
ted their praise to the all but general voice; nay, some 
scrupled not to call him, from his perfect ease and nature 
and variety, the Scottish Shakspeare. No one rejoiced 
more in his success and his fame, than the matron of 
Mossgiel. 



116 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

Other matters than his poems and socialities claimed 
the attention of Burns in Edinburgh. He had a hearty 
relish for the joyous genius of Allan Ramsay ; he traced 
out his residences, and rejoiced to think that while he 
stood in the shop of his own bookseller, Creech, the same 
floor had been trod by the feet of his great forerunner. 
He visited, too, the lowly grave of the unfortunate Robert 
Ferguson ; and it must be recorded to the shame of the 
magistrates of Edinburgh, that they allowed him to erect 
a headstone to his memory, and to the scandal of Scotland, 
that in such a memorial he had not been anticipated. He 
seems not to have regarded the graves of scholars or phi- 
losophers 5 and he trod the pavements where the warlike 
princes and nobles had walked without any emotion. He 
loved, however, to see places celebrated in Scottish song, 
and fields where battles for the independence of his country 
had been stricken ; and, with money in his pocket which 
his poems had produced, and with a letter from a witty 
but weak man, Lord Buchan, instructing him to pull birks 
on the Yarrow, broom on the Cowden-knowes, and not to 
neglect to admire the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey, Burns set 
out on a border tour, accompanied by Robert Ainslie, of 
Berrywell. As the poet had talked of returning to the 
plough. Dr. Blair imagined that he was on his way back 
to the furrowed field, and wrote him a handsome farewell, 
saying he was leaving Edinburgh with a character which 
had survived many temptations; with a name which would 
be placed with the Ramsays and the Fergusons, and with 
the hopes of all that, in a second volume, on which his 
fate as a poet would very much depend, he might rise yet 
higher in merit and in fame. Burns, who received this 
communication when laying his leg over the saddle to be 
gone, is said to have muttered, " Aye, but a man's first 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 117 

book is sometimes like his first babe, healthier and stronger 
than those which follow." 
/ On the 6th of May, 1787. Bams reached Berrywell : 
1 he recorded of the laird, that he was clear headed, and of 
Miss Ainslie, that she was amiable and handsome — of 
Dudgeon, the author of " The Maid that tends the Goats," 
that he had penetration and modesty, and the preacher, 
Bowmaker, that he was a man of strong lungs and vigor- 
ous remark. On crossing the Tweed at Coldstream he 
took off his hat, and kneeling down, repeated aloud the 
two last verses of the " Cotter's Saturday Night :" on re- 
turning, he drank tea with Brydone, the traveller, a man, 
he said, kind and benevolent : he cursed one Cole as an 
English Hottentot, for having rooted out an ancient gar- 
den belonging to a Romish ruin ; and he wrote of Mac- 
dowal, of Caverton-mill, that by his skill in rearing sheep, 
he sold his flocks, ewe and lamb, for a couple of guineas 
each : that he washed his sheep before shearing — and by 
his turnips improved sheep-husbandry ; he added, that 
lands were generally let at sixteen shillings the Scottish 
acre : the farmers rich, and compared to Ayrshire, their 
houses magnificent. On his way to Jedburgh he visited 
an old gentleman in whose house was an arm-chair, once 
the property of the author of "The Seasons;" he reve- 
rently examined the relique, and could scarcely be persua- 
ded to sit in it : he was a warm admirer of Thomson. 

In Jedburgh Burns found much to interest him : the 
ruins of a splendid cathedral, and of a strong castle — and, 
what was still more attractive, an amiable young lady, very 
handsome, with " beautiful hazel eyes, full of spirit, spark- 
ling with delicious moisture," and looks which betokened 
a high order of female mind. He gave her his portrait, and 
entered this remembrance of her attractions amonor bis 



lis LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

memoranda: — " My heart is thawed into melting plea- 
sure, after being so long frozen tip in the Grpenland bay 
of indifference, amid the noise and nonsense of Edin- 
burgh. I am afraid my bosom has nearly as much tinder 
as ever. Jed, pure be thy streams, and hallowed thy 
sylvan banks : sweet Isabella Lindsay, may peace dwell 
in thy bosom uninterrupted, except by the tumultuous 
th robbings of rapturous love !" AVith the freedom of 
Jedburgh handsomely bestowed by the magistrates, in 
his pocket. Burns made his way to Wauchope, the resi- 
dence of Mrs. Scott, who had welcomed him into the 
world as a poet in verses lively and graceful : he found 
her, he said, " a lady of sense and taste, and of a decision 
peculiar to female authors." After dining with Sir Alex- 
ander Don, who, he said, was a clever man, but far from 
a match for his divine lady, a sister of his patron Glen- 
cairn, he spent an hour among the beautiful ruins of 
Dryburgh Abbey ; glanced on the splendid remains of 
Melrose ; passed, unconscious of the future, over that 
ground on which have arisen the romantic towers of 
Abbotsford ; dined with certain of the Souters of Sel- 
kirk ; and visited the old keep of Thomas the Rhymer, 
and a dozen of the hills and streams celebrated in song. 
Nor did he fail to pay his respects, after returning through 
Dunse, to Sir James Hall, of Dunglass, and his lady, 
and was much pleased with the scenery of their roman- 
tic place. He was now joined by a gentleman of 
the name of Kerr, and crossing the Tweed, a second time, 
penetrated into England, as far as the ancient town of 
Newcastle, where he smiled at a facetious Northumbrian, 
who at dinner caused the beef to be eaten before the 
broth was served, in obedience to an ancient injunction, 
lest the hungry Scotch should come and snatch it. On 



LIFE OP ROBERT BURNS. 119 

his way back he saw, what proved to be prophetic of his 
own fortune — the roup of an unfortunate farmer's stock : 
he took out his journal, and wrote with a troubled brow, 
" Rigid economy, and decent industry ; do you preserve 
me from being the principal dramatis j^crsonoz, in such a 
scene of horror." He extended his tour to Carlisle, and 
from thence to the banks of the Nith, where he looked at 
the farm of Ellisland, with the intention of trying once 
more his fortune at the plough, should poetry and patron- 
age fail him. 

On his way through the West, Burns spent a few days 
with his mother at Mossgiel : he had left her an unknown 
and an almost banished man : he returned in fame and in 
sunshine, admired by all who aspired to be thought taste- 
ful or refined. He felt offended alike with the patiician 
stateliness of Edinburgh and the plebeian servility of the 
husbandmen of Ayrshire ; and dreading the influence of 
the unlucky star which had hitherto ruled his lot, he bought 
a pocket Milton, he said, for the purpose of studying 
the intrepid independence and daring magnanimity, and 
noble defiance of hardships exhibited by Satan ! In this 
mood he reached Edinburgh — only to leave it again on 
three hurried excursions into the Highlands. The route 
which he took and the sentiments which the scenes 
awakened, are but faintly intimated in the memoranda 
which he made. His first journey seems to have been 
performed in ill-humor ; at Stirling his Jacobitism, pro- 
voked at seeing the ruined palace of the Stuarts, broke 
out in some unloyal lines, which he had the indiscretion to 
write with a diamond on the window of a public inn. At 
Carron, where he was refused a sight of the magnificent 
foundry, he avenged himself in epigram. At Inverary he 
resented some real or imaginary neglect on the part of 



120 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

his Grace of Argyll, by a stinging lampoon ; nor can he 
be said to have fairly regained his serenity of temper, till 
he danced his wrath away with some Highland ladies at 
Dumbarton. 

His second excursion was made in the company of Dr. 
Adair, of Harrowgate : the reluctant doors of Carron 
foundry were opened to him, and he expressed his wonder 
at the blazing furnaces and broiling labors of the place ; 
he removed the disloyal lines from the window of the inn 
at Stirling, and he paid a two days' visit to Hamsay of 
Ochtertyre, a distinguished scholar, and discussed with 
him future topics for the muse. " I have been in the 
company of many men of genius," said Ramsay after- 
wards to Currie, "some of them poets, but never witnessed 
such flashes of intellectual brightness as from him — the 
impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire." From 
the Forth he went to the Devon, in the county of Clack- 
mannan, where, for the first time, he saw the beautiful 
Charlotte Hamilton, the sister of his friend Gavin Hamil- 
ton, of Mauchline. '* She is not only beautiful," he thus 
writes to her brother, " but lovely ; her form is elegant, 
her features not regular, but they have the smile of sweet- 
ness, and the settled complacency of good nature in the 
highest degree. Her eyes are fascinating ; at once 
expressive of good sense, tenderness and a noble mind. 
After the exercise of our riding to the Falls, Charlotte 
was exactly Dr. Donne's mistress: — 

" Her pure and eloquent blood 
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, 
That one would almost say her body thought," 

Accompanied by this charming dame, he visited an old 
lady, Mrs. Bruce, of Clackmannan, who, in the belief that 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 121 

she had the blood of the royal Bruce in her vehis, received 
the poet with something of princely state, and half in jest, 
conferred the honor of knighthood upon him, with her 
ancestor's sword, saying, in true jacobitical mood, that 
she had a better right to do that than some folk had ! 
In the same pleasing company he visited the famous 
cataract on the Devon, called the Cauldron Linn, and the 
Rumbling bridge, a single arch thrown, it is said by the 
devil, over the Devon, at the height of a hundred feet in 
the air. It was the complaint of his companions that 
Burns exhibited no raptures, and poured out no unpre- 
meditated verses at such m-agnificent scenes. But he did 
not like to be tutored or prompted: "Look look!" 
exclaimed some one, ai Carron foundry belched forth 
flames — "look, Burns, look ! good heavens, what a grand 
sight ! — look!" " I would not look — look, sir, at your 
bidding," said the bard, turning away, " were it into the 
mouth of hell !" When he visited, at a future time, the 
romantic Linn of Creehope, in Nithsdale, he looked 
silently at its wonders, and showed none of the hoped-for 
rapture. " You do not admire it, I fear," said a gentleman 
who accompanied him : " I could not admire it more, 
sir," replied Burns, " if He who made it were to desire 
me to do it." There are other reasons for the silence of 
Burns amid the scenes of the Devon : he was charmed 
into love by the sense and beauty of Charlotte Hamilton, 
and rendered her homage in that sweet song, " The Banks 
of the Devon," and in a dozen letters written with more 
than his usual care, elegance, and tenderness. But the 
lady was neither to be won by verse nor by prose : she 
afterwards gave her hand to Adair, the poet's companion, 
and what was less meritorious, threw his letters into the 
fire. 

11 



122 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

The third and last tour into the North was in the com- 
pany of Nicol, of the High-School of Edinburgh : on the 
fields of Bannockburn and Falkirk — places of triumph 
and of wo to Scotland, he gave way to patriotic im- 
pulses, and in these words he recorded them — "Stir- 
ling, August 26, 1787 : this morning I knelt at the tomb 
of Sir John the Graham, the gallant friend of the immor- 
tal Wallace ; and two hours ago I said a fervent prayer 
for old Caledonia, over the hole in a whinstone where 
Robert the Bruce fixed his royal standard on the 
banks of Bannockburn." He then proceeded northward 
by Ochtertyre, the water of Earn, the vale of Glen 
Almond, and the traditionary grave of Ossian. He looked 
in at princely Taymouth ; mused an hour or two among 
the Birks of Aberfeldy ; gazed from Birnam top ; paused 
amid the wild grandeur of the pass of Killiecrankie, at 
the stone which marks the spot where a second patriot 
Graham fell, and spent a day at Blair, where he experi- 
enced the graceful kindness of the Duke of Athol, and 
in a strain truly elegant, petitioned him, in the name of 
Bruar Water, to hide the utter nakedness of its otherwise 
picturesque banks, with plantations of birch and oak. 
Quitting Blair he followed the course of the Spey, and 
passing, as he told his brother, through a wild country, 
among cliffs gray with eternal snows, and glens gloomy 
and savage, reached Findhorn in mist and darkness ; 
visited Castle Cawdor, where Macbeth murdered Dun- 
can ; hastened through Inverness to Urquhart Castle, and 
the Falls of Fyers, and turned southward to Kilravock, 
over the fatal moor of Culloden. He admired the ladies 
of that classic region for their snooded ringlets, simple 
elegance of dress, and expressive eyes : in Mrs. Rose, of 
Kilravock Castle, he found that matronly grace and dig- 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 123 

nity which he owned he loved ; and in the Duke and 
Duchess of Gordon a renewal of that more than kindness 
with which they had welcomed him in Edinburgh. But 
while he admired the palace of Fochabers, and was 
charmed by the condescensions of the noble proprietors, 
he forgot that he had left a companion at the inn, too 
proud and captious to be pleased at favors showered on 
others ; he hastened back to the inn with an invitation 
and an apology : he found the fiery pedant in a foaming 
rage, striding up and do\^^l the street, cursing in Scotch 
and Latin the loitering postilions, for not yoking the 
horses, and hunying him away. All apology and expla- 
nation was in vain, and Burns, with a vexation which he 
sought not to conceal, took his seat silently beside the 
irascible pedagogue, and returned to the South by 
Broughty Castle, the banks of Endermay and Queens- 
ferry. He parted with the Highlands in a kindly mood, 
and loved to recall the scenes and the people, both in con- 
versation and in song. 

On his return to Edinburgh he had to bide the time of 
his bookseller and the public : the impression of his 
poems extending to two thousand eight hundred copies 
was sold widely : much of the money had to come from 
a distance, and Buras lingered about the northern me- 
tropolis, expecting a settlement with Creech, and A\dth 
the hope that those who dispensed his country's patronage 
might remember one who then, as now, was reckoned an 
ornament to the land. But Creech, a parsimonious man, 
was slow in his payments ; the patronage of the country 
was swallowed up in the sink of politics ; and though 
noblemen smiled, and ladies of rank nodded their jewelled 
heads in approbation of every new song he sung and 
every witty sally he uttered, they reckoned any further 



124 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

notice or care superfluous : the poet, an observant man, 
saw all this ; but hope was the cordial of his heart, he 
said, and he hoped and lingered on. Too active a genius 
to remain idle, he addressed himself to the twofold busi- 
ness of love and verse. Repulsed by the stately Beauty 
of the Devon, he sought consolation in the society of one, 
as fair, and infinitely more witty ; and as an accident had 
for a time deprived him of the use of one of his legs, he 
gave wings to hours of pain, by writing a series of letters 
to this Edinburgh enchantress, in which he signed him- 
self Sylvander, and addressed her under the name of 
Clarinda. In these compositions, which no one can 
regard as serious, and which James Grahame the poet 
called " a romance of real Platonic affection," amid such 
affectation both of language and sentiment, and a desire to 
say fine and startling things, we can see the proud heart of 
the poet throbbing in the dread of being neglected or forgot- 
ten by his country. The love which he offers up at the 
altar of wit and beauty, seems assumed and put on, for its 
rapture is artificial, and its brilliancy that of an icicle : no 
woman was ever wooed and won in that Malvolio way ; 
and there is no doubt that Mrs. M'Lehose felt as much 
offence as pleasure at this boisterous display of regard. 
In aftertimes he loved to remember her: — when wine 
circulated, Mrs. Mac was his favorite toast. 

During this season he began his lyric.contributions to 
the Musical Museum of Johnson, a work which, amid 
many imperfections of taste and arrangement, contains 
more of the true old music and genuine old songs of Scot- 
land, than any other collection with which I am acquainted. 
Burns gathered oral airs and fitted them with words of 
mirth or of wo, of tenderness or of humor, with unexam- 
pled readiness and felicity j he eked out old fragments 



• LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 125 

and sobered down licentious strains so much in the olden 
spirit and feeling, that the new cannot be distinguished 
from the ancient : nay, he inserted lines and half lines, 
with such skill and nicety, that antiquarians are perplexed 
to settle which is genuine or which is simulated. Yet 
with all this he abated none of the natural mirth or the 
racy humor of the lyric muse of Scotland : he did not 
like her the less because she walked like some of the 
maidens of her strains, high-kilted at times, and spoke 
with the freedom of innocence. In these communica- 
tions we observe how little his border-jaunt among the 
fountains of ancient song contributed either of sentiment 
or allusion, to his lyrics; and how deeply his strains, 
whether of pity or of merriment, were colored by what 
he had seen, and heard, and Yelt in the Highlands. In 
truth, all that lay beyond the Forth was an undiscovered 
land to him ; while the lowland districts were not only fa- 
miliar to his mind and eye, but all their more romantic vales 
and hills and streams were already musical in songs of 
such excellence as induced him to dread failure rather 
than hope triumph. Moreover, the Highlands teemed 
with jacobitical feelings, and scenes hallowed by the 
blood or the sufferings of men heroic, and perhaps mis- 
guided ; and the poet, willingly yielding to an impulse 
which was truly romantic, and believed by thousands to 
be loyal, penned his songs on Drumossie and Killie- 
crankie, as the spirit of sorrow or of bitterness prevailed. 
Though accompanied, during his northern excursions, by 
friends whose socialities and conversation forbade deep 
thought, or even serious remark, it will be seen by those 
who read his lyrics with care, that his wreath is indebted 
for some of its fairest flowers to the Highlands. 

The second winter of the poet's abode in Edinburgh 
11* 



126 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

had now amved : it opened as might have been expected, 
with less rapturous welcomes and with more of frosty 
civility than the first. It must be confessed, that indul- 
gence in prolonged socialities, and in company which, 
though clever, could not be called select, contributed to 
this : nor must it be forgotten that his love for the sweeter 
part of creation was now and then carried beyond the 
limits of poetic respect, and the delicacies of courtesy ; 
tending to estrange the austere and to lessen the admi- 
ration at first common to all. Other causes may be as- 
signed for this wane of popularity : he took no care to 
conceal his contempt for all who depended on mere 
scholarship for eminence, and he had a perilous knack 
in sketching -with a sarcastic hand the characters of the 
learned and the grave. Some indeed of the high literati 
of the north — Home, the author of Douglas, was one of 
them — spoke of the poet as a chance, or an accident : 
and though they admitted that he was a poet, yet he was 
not one of settled grandeur of soul, brightened by study. 
Burns was probably aware of this : he takes occasion in 
some of his letters to suggest, that the hour may be at 
hand when he shall be accounted by scholars as a meteor, 
rather than a fixed light, and to suspect that the praise be- 
stowed on his genius was partly owing tothehumility of his 
condition. From his lingering so long about Edinburgh, 
the nobility began to dread a second volume by subscrip- 
tion, the learned to regard him as a fierce Theban, who re- 
solved to carry all the outworks to the the temple of Fame 
without the labor of making regular approaches ; while a 
third party, and not the least numerous, looked on him 
with distrust, as one who hovered between Jacobite and 
Jacobin ; who disliked the loyal-minded, and loved to 
lampoon the reigning family. Besides, the marvel of the 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 127 

inspired ploughman had begun to subside ; the bright 
gloss of novelty was worn off, and his fault lay in his 
unwillingness fo see that he had made all the sport which 
the Philistines expected, and was required to make room 
for some " salvage" of the season, to paw, and roar, and, 
shake the mane. The doors of the titled, which at first 
opened spontaneous, like those in Milton's heaven, were 
now unclosed for him with a tardy courtesy : he was 
received with measured stateliness, and seldom requested 
to repeat his visit. Of this changed aspect of things he 
complained to a fiiend : but his real sorrows were mixed 
with those of the fancy : — he told Mrs. Dunlop with what 
pangs of heart he was compelled to take shelter in a cor- 
ner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead 
should mangle him in the mire. In this land of titles and 
wealth such querulous sensibilities must have been fre- 
quently offended. 

Burns, who had talked lightly hitherto of resuming the 
plough, began now to think seriously about it, for he saw 
it must come to that at last. Miller, of Dalswinton, a gen- 
tleman of scientific acquirements, and who has the merit 
of applying the impulse of steam to navigation, had offer- 
ed the poet the choice of his farms, on a fair estate which 
he had purchased on the Nith : aided by a westland 
farmer, he selected Ellisland, a beautiful spot, fit alike for 
the steps of ploughman or poet. On intimating this to 
the magnates of Edinburgh, no one lamented that a 
genius so bright and original should be driven to win his 
bread with the sweat of his brow : no one, with an indig- 
nant eye, ventured to tell those to whom the patronage of 
this magnificent empire was confided, that they were mis- 
using the sacred trust, and that posterity would curse them 
for their coldness or neglect : neither did any of the rich 



128 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

nobles, whose tables he had adorned by his wit, offer to 
enable him to toil free of rent, in a land of which he was 
to be a permanent ornament : — all were silent — all were 
cold — the Earl of Glencairn alone, aided by Alexander 
Wood, a gentleman who merits praise oftener than he is 
named, did the little that was done or attempted to be 
done for him : nor was that little done on the peer's part 
without solicitation: — "I wish to go into the excise;" 
thus he wrote to Glencairn; "and I am told your lord- 
ship's interest will easily procure me the grant from the 
commissioners : and your lordship's patronage and good- 
ness, which have already rescued me from obscurity, 
wretchedness, and exile, emboldens me to ask that in- 
terest. You have likewise put it in my power to save 
the little tie of home that sheltered an aged mother, two 
brothers, and three sisters from destruction. I am ill quali- 
fied to dog the heels of greatness with the impertinence 
of solicitation, and tremble nearly as much at the thought 
of the cold promise as the cold denial." The farm and 
the excise exhibit the poet's humble scheme of life : the 
money of the one, he thought, would support the toil of 
the other, and in the fortunate management of both he 
looked for the rough abundance, if not the elegancies suit- 
able to a poet's condition. 

"While Scotland was disgraced by sordidly allowing her 
brightest genius to descend to the plough and the excise, 
the poet hastened his departure from a city which had 
witnessed both his triumph and his shame : he bade fare- 
well in a few well-chosen words to such of the classic 
literati — the Blairs, the Stewarts, the Mackenzies, and 
the Tytlers — as had welcomed the rustic bard and con- 
tinued to countenance him ; while in softer accents he 
bade adieu to the Clarindas and Chlorises of whose charms 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 129 

he had sung, and, having wrung a settlement from Creech, 
he turned his steps towards Mossgiel and Mauchline. 
He had several reasons, and all serious ones, for taking 
Ayrshire in his way to the Nith : he desired to see his 
mother, his brothers and sisters, who had partaken of his 
success, and were now raised from pining penury to com- 
parative affluence : he desired to see those who had aided 
him in his early struggles into the upper air — perhaps 
those, too, who had looked coldly on, and smiled at his 
outward aspirations after fame or distinction ; but more 
than all, he desired to see one whom he once and still 
dearly loved, who had been a sufferer for his sake, and 
whom he proposed to make mistress of his fireside, and 
the sharer of his fortunes. Even while ' whispering of 
love to Charlotte Hamilton, on the banks of the Devon, 
or sighing out the affected sentimentalities of platonic or 
pastoral love in the ear of Clarinda, his thoughts wandered 
to her whom he had left bleaching her webs among the 
daises on Mauchline braes — she had still his heart, and in 
spite of her own and her father's disclamation, she was 
his wife. It was one of the delusions of this great poet, 
as well as of those good people, the Armours, that the 
marriage had been dissolved by the destruction of the 
marriage-lines, and that Robert Bums and Jean Armour 
were as single as though they had neither vowed nor 
written themselves man and wife. Be that as it may, the 
time was come when all scruples and obstacles were to 
be removed which stood in the way of their union : their 
hands were united by Gavin Hamilton, according to law, 
in April, 1788; and even the Reverend Mr. Auld, so mer- 
cilessly lampooned, smiled forgivingly as the poet satis- 
fied a church wisely scrupulous regarding the sacred 
ceremony of marriage. 



130 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

Though Jean Armour was but a country lass of hum- 
ble degree, she had sense and intelligence, and personal 
charms sufficient not only to win and fix the affections of 
the poet, but to sanction the praise which he showered 
on her in song. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, he thus 
describes her : " The most placid good nature and sweet- 
ness of disposition, a warm heart, gratefully devoted with 
all its powers to love me ; vigorous health and sprightly 
cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage by a more than 
commonly handsome figure : these I think in a woman 
may make a good wife, though she should never have read 
a page but the Scriptures, nor have danced in a brighter 
assembly than a penny-pay wedding." To the accom- 
plished Margaret Chalmers, of Edinburgh, he adds, to 
complete the picture, " I have got the handsomest figure, 
the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and kind- 
est heart in the country : a certain late publication of Scots' 
poems she has perused very devoutly, and all the ballads 
in the land, as she has the finest wood-note wild you ever 
heard." With his young wife, a punch bowl of Scottish 
marble, and an eight-day clock, both presents from Mr. 
Armour, now reconciled to his eminent son-in-law, with 
a new plough, and a beautiful heifer, given by Mrs. Dun- 
lop, vvith about four hundred pounds in his pocket, a 
resolution to toil, and a hope of success, Burns made his 
. appearance on the banks of the Nith, and set up his staff 
) at EUisland. This farm, now a classic spot, is about six 
miles up the river from Dumfries ; it extends to upwards 
of an hundred acres: the soil is kindly; the holmland 
portion of it loamy and rich, and it has at command fine 
walks on the river-side, and views of the Friar's Carse, 
Cowehill, and Dalswinton. For a while the poet had to 
hide his head in a smoky hovel : till a house to his fancy, 



Llf*E OP ROBERT BURNS. 131 

and offices for his cattle and his crops were built, his ac- 
commodation was sufficiently humble : and his mind, 
taking its hue from his situation, infused a bitterness into 
the letters in which he first made known to his western 
friends that he had fixed his abode in Nithsdale. " I am 
here," said he, " at the very elbow of existence : the only 
things to be found in perfection in this country are stu- 
pidity and canting : prose they only know in graces and 
prayers, and the value of these they estimate as they do 
their plaiden-w^ebs, by the ell ; as for the muses, they 
have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet." " This 
is an undiscovered clime," he at another period exclaims, 
** it is unknown to poetry, and prose never looked on it 
save in drink. I sit by the fire, and listen to the hum of 
the spinning-wheel : I hear, but cannot see it, for it is 
hidden in the smoke which eddies round and round me 
before it seeks to escape by window and door. I have 
no converse but with the ignorance which encloses me : 
no kenned face but that of my old mare, Jenny Geddes — 
my life is dwindled down to mere existence." 

When the poet's new house was built and plenished, 
and the atmosphere of his mind began to clear, he found 
the land to be fruitful, and its people intelligent and wise. 
In Riddel of Friar's Carse, he found a scholar and anti- 
quarian ; in Miller, of Dalswinton, a man conversant with 
science as well as with the world ; in M'Murdo, of Drum- 
lanrig, a generous and accomplished gentleman ; and in 
John Syme, of Ryedale, a man much after his own heart, 
and a lover of the wit and socialities of polished life. 
Of these gentlemen Riddel, who was his neighbor, was 
the favorite : a door was made in the march-fence which 
separated Ellisland from Friar's Carse, that the poet 
might indulge in the retirement of the Carse hermitage, 



132 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

a little lodge in the wood, as romantic as it was beautiful, 
while a pathway was cut through the dwarf oaks and 
birches which fringed the river bank, to enable the poet 
to saunter and muse without lett or interruption. This 
attention was rewarded by an inscription for the hermit- 
age, written with elegance as well as feeling, and which 
was the first fruits of his fancy in this unpoetic land. In 
a happier strain he remembered Matthew Henderson : 
this is one of the sweetest as well as happiest of his poetic 
compositions. He heard of his friend's death, and called 
on nature animate and inanimate, to lament the loss of 
one who held the patent of his honors from God alone, 
and who loved all that was pure and lovely and good. 
"The Whistle " is another of his Ellisland compositions: 
the contest which he has recorded with such spirit and 
humor took place almost at his door : the heroes were 
Ferguson, of Craigdarroch, Sir Robert Laurie, of Max- 
welltown, and Riddel, of the Friar's Carse : the poet was 
present, and drank bottle and bottle with the best, and 
when all was done he seemed much disposed, as an old 
servant at Friar's Carse remembered, to take up the 
victor. 

Burns had become fully reconciled to Nithsdale, and 
was on the most intimate terms with the muse when he 
produced Tam o' Shanter, the crowning glory of all his 
poems. For this marvellous tale we are indebted to some- 
thing like accident : Francis Grose, the antiquary, hap- 
pened to visit Friar's Carse, and as he loved wine and 
wit, the total want of imagination was no hinderance to 
his friendly intercourse with the poet : " Alloway's auld 
haunted kirk " was mentioned, and Grose said he would 
include it in his illustrations of the antiquities of Scotland, 
if the bard of the Doon would write a poem to accompany 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 133 

it. Burns consented, and before he left the table the 
various traditions which belonged to the ruin were passing 
through his mind. One of these was of a farmer, who, on a 
night wild with wind and rain, on passing the old kirk was 
startled by a light glimmering inside the walls : on draw- 
ins: near he saw a caldron hunsr over a fire, in which the 
heads and limbs of children were simmering : there were 
neither witch nor fiend to guard it, so he unhooked the cal- 
dron, and turned out the contents, and carried it home as 
a trophy. A second tradition was of a man of Kyle, who, 
having been on a market night detained late in Ayr, on. 
crossing the old bridge of Doon, on his way home, saw a 
light streaming through the gothic window of Alloway 
kirk, and on riding near, beheld a batch of the district 
witches dancing merrily round their master, the devil, 
who kept them '* louping and flinging" to the sound of a 
bagpipe. He knew several of the old crones, and smiled 
at their gambols, for they were dancing in their smocks : 
but one of them, she happened to be young and rosy, had 
on a smock shorter than those of her companions by two 
spans at least, which so moved the farmer, that he exclaim- 
ed *' Weel luppan Maggie wi' the short sark !" Satan 
stopped his music, the light was extinguished, and out 
rushed the hags after the farmer, who made at the gallop 
for the bridge of Doon, knowing that they could not cross 
a stream : he escaped ; but Maggie, who was foremost, 
seized his horse's tail at the middle of the bridge, and 
pulled it off in her efforts to stay him. 

This poem was the work of a single day : Burns walked 
out to his favorite musing path, which runs towards the 
old tower of the Isle, along Nithside, and was observed to 
walk hastily and mutter as he went. His wife knew by 
these signs that he was engaged in composition, and 
12 



134 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

watched him from the window ; at last, wearying, and 
moreover wondering at the unusual length of his medita- 
tions, she took her children with her and went to meet him ; 
but as he seemed not to see her, she stept aside among 
the broom to allow him to pass, which he did with a flush- 
ed brow and dropping eyes, reciting these lines aloud : — 

"Now Tarn ! O, Tarn ! had thae been queans, 
A' phimp and strapping in their teens, 
Their sarks, instead o' creeshie flannen, 
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen ! 
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair, 
That ance were plush o' gude blue hair, 
I wad hae gien them afF my hurdies 
For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies ! " 

He embellished this wild tradition from fact as well as 
from fancy : along the road which. Tam came on that 
eventful night his memory supplied circumstances which 
prepared him for the strange sight at the kirk of Allo- 
way. A poor chapman had perished, some winters before, 
in the snow ; a murdered child had been found by some 
early hunters ; a tippling farmer had fallen from his horse 
at the expense of liis neck, beside a " meikle stane ;" and 
a melancholy old woman had hanged herself at the bush 
aboon the well, as the poem relates : all these matters the 
poet pressed into the service of the muse, and used them 
with a skill which adorns rather than oppresses the legend. 
A pert lawyer from Dumfries objected to the language as 
obscure: " Obscure, sir !" said Bums; "you know not 
the language of that great master of your own art — the 
devil. If you had a witch for your client you would not 
be able to manage her defence !" 

He wrote few poems after his marriage, but he com- 
posed many songs : the sweet voice of Mrs. Bums and 
the cravinor of Johnson's Museum will in some measure 



LIFE OP ROBERT BURNS. 135 

account for the number, but not for their variety, which is 
truly wonderful. In the history of that mournful strain, 
" Mary in Heaven," we read the story of many of his 
lyrics, for they generally sprang from his personal feel- 
ings : no poet has put more of himself into his poetry 
than Burns. " Robert, though ill of a cold," said his wife, 
" had been busy all day — a day of September, 1789, with 
the shearers in the field, and as he had got most of the 
corn into the stack-yard, was in good spirits ; but when 
the twilight came he grew sad about something, and could 
not rest : he wandered first up the water-side, and then 
went into the stack-yard : I followed, and begged him to 
come into the house, as he was ill, and the air was sharp 
and cold. He said, * Aye, aye,' but did not come : he 
threw himself down on some loose sheaves, and lay look- 
ing at the sky, and particularly at a large, bright star, 
which shone like another moon. At last, but that was 
Iqng after I had left him, he came home — the song was 
already composed." To the memory of Mary Campbell 
he dedicated that touching ode ; and he thus intimates the 
continuance of his early affection for " The fair-haired lass 
of the west," in a letter of that time to Mrs. Dunlop: "If 
there is another life, it must be only for the just, the bene- 
volent, the amiable, and the humane. What a flattering 
idea, then, is a world to come ! There shall I, with 
speechless agony of rapture, again recognise my lost, my 
ever dear Mary, whose bosom was fraught with truth, 
honor, constancy, and love." These melancholy words 
gave way in their turn to others of a nature lively and 
humorous : " Tam Glen," in which the thoughts flow as 
freely as the waters of the Nith, on whose banks he wrote 
it; "Findlay," with its quiet vein of sly simplicity; 
" Willie brewed a peck o' maut," the first of social, and 



136 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

*' She's fair and fause," the first of sarcastic songs, with 
** The deil's awa wi' the Exciseman," are all productions 
of this period — a period which had besides its own fears 
and its own forebodings. 

For a while Burns seemed to prosper in his farm : he 
held the plough with his own hand, he guided the har- 
rows, he distributed the seed-corn equally among the 
furrows, and he reaped the crop in its season, and saw it 
safely covered in from the storms of winter with " thack 
and rape ;" his wife, too, superintended the dairy with 
a skill which she had brought from Kyle, and as the har- 
vest, for a season or two, was abundant, and the dairy 
yielded butter and cheese for the market, it seemed that 
" the luckless star" which ruled his lot had relented, and 
now shone unboding and benignly. But much raore is 
required than toil of hand to make a successful farmer, nor 
will the attention bestowed only by fits and starts, com- 
pensate for carelessness or oversight ; frugality, not in one 
thing but in all, is demanded, in small matters as well as 
great, while a careful mind and a vigilant eye must super- 
intend the labors of servants, a.nd the whole system of in- 
door and out-door economy. Now, during the three years 
which Burns stayed in Ellisland, he neither wrought with 
that constant diligence which farming demands, nor did 
he bestow upon it the unremitting attention of eye and 
mind which such a farm required : besides his skill in 
husbandry was but moderate — the rent, though of his 
own fixing, was too high for him and for the times ; the 
ground, though good, was not so excellent as he might 
have had on the same estate — he employed more ser- 
vants than ' the number of acres demanded, and sjDread 
for them a richer board than common : when we have 
said this we need not add the expensive tastes induced by 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 137 

poetry, to keep readers from starting, when they are told 
that Burns, at the close of the third year of occupation, 
resigned his lease to the landlord, and bade farewell for 
ever to the plough. He was not, however, quite desolate ; 
he had for a year or more been appointed on the excise, 
and had superintended a district extending to ten large 
parishes, with applause ; indeed, it has been assigned as 
the chief reason for failure in his farm, that when the 
plough or the sickle summoned him to the field, he was to 
be found, either pursuing the defaulters of the revenue, 
among the valleys of Dumfrieshire, or measuring out 
pastoral verse to the beauties of the land. He retired to 
a house in the Bank-vennel of Dumfries, and commenced 
a town-life : he commenced it with an empty pocket, for 
Ellisland had swallowed up all the profits of his poems : 
he had now neither a barn to produce meal nor barley, a 
barn-yard- to yield a fat hen, a field to which he could go 
at Martinmas for a mart, nor a dairy to supply milk and 
cheese and butter to the table — he had, in short, all to 
buy and little to pay with. He regarded it as a compen- 
sation that he had no farm-rent to provide, no bankrupt- 
cies to dread, no horse to keep, for his excise duties were 
now confined to Dumfries, and that the burthen of a bar- 
ren farm was removed fcem his mind, and his muse at 
liberty to renew her unsolicited strains. 

But from the day of his departure from " the barren" 
Ellisland, the downward course of Burns may be dated. 
The cold neglect of his country had driven him back 
indignantly to the plough, and he hoped to gain from the 
furrowed field that independence which it was the duty 
of Scotland to have provided ; but he did not resume the 
plough with all the advantages he possessed when he first 
forsook it : he had revelled in the luxuries of polished life — 
12* 



138 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

his tastes had been rendered expensive as well as pure : 
he had witnessed, and he hoped for the pleasures of lite- 
rary retirement, while the hands which had led jewelled 
dames over scented carpets to supper-tables loaded with 
silver, took hold of the hilts of the plough with more of 
reluctance than goodwill. Edinburgh, with its lords and 
ladies, its delights and its hopes, spoiled him for farming. 
Nor were his new labors more acceptable to his haughty 
spirit than those of the plough: the excise for a century 
had been a word of opprobrium or of hatred in the north : 
the duties which it imposed were regarded, not by pea- 
sants alone, as a serious encroachment upon the ancient 
rights of the nation, and to mislead a gauger, or resist 
him, even to blood, was considered by few as a fault. 
That the brightest genius of the nation — one whose 
tastes and sensibilities were so peculiarly its own — 
should be, as a reward, set to look after run-rum and 
smuggled tobacco, and to gauge ale-wife's barrels, was a 
regret and a marvel to many, and a source of bitter mer- 
riment to Burns himself. 

The duties of his situation were however performed 
punctually, if not with pleasure : he was a vigilant officer ; 
he was also a merciful and considerate one : though 
loving a joke, and not at all averse to a dram, he walk- 
ed among suspicious brewers, captious ale-wives, and 
frowning shopkeepers as uprightly as courteously : he 
smoothed the ruggedest natures into acquiescence by his 
gaiety and humor, and yet never gave cause for a malicious 
remarkby allowing his vigilance to slumber. He was brave, 
too, and in the capture of an armed smuggler, in which he 
led the attack, showed that he neither feared water nor fire : 
he loved, also, to counsel the more forward of the smug- 
glers to abandon their dangerous calling ; his sympathy 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 139 

for the helpless poor induced him to give them now and 
then a notice of his approach ; he has been known to in- 
terpret the severe laws of the excise into tenderness and 
mercy in behalf of the widow and the fatherless. In all 
this he did but his duty to his country and his kind : and 
his conduct was so regarded by a very competent and 
candid judge. ** Let me look at the books of Burns," 
said Maxwell, of Ten-aughty, at a ipeeting of the district 
magistrates, " for they show that an upright officer may 
be a merciful one." With a salary of some seventy 
pounds a year, the chance of a few guineas annually 
from the future editions of his poems, and the hope of 
rising at some distant day to the more lucrative situation 
of supervisor. Burns continued to live in Dumfries ; first 
in the Bank-vennel, and next in a small house in a hum- 
ble .street, since called by his name. 

In his earlier years the poet seems to have scattered 
songs as thick as a summer eve scatters its dews ; nor 
did he scatter them less carelessly : he appears, indeed, 
to have thought much less of them than of his poems: the 
sweet song of Mary Morison, and others not at all inferior, 
lay unregarded among his papers till accident called them 
out to shine and be admired. Many of these brief but 
happy compositions, sometimes with his name, and oftener 
without, he threw in dozens at a time into Johnson, where 
they were noticed only by the captious Ritson : but now 
a work of higher pretence claimed a share in his skill : 
in September, 1792, he was requested by George Thom- 
son to render, for his national collection, the poetry worthy 
of the muses of the north, and to take compassion on 
many choice airs, which had waited for a poet like the 
author of the Cotter's Saturday Night, to wed them to 
immortal verse. To engage in such an undertaking, 



140 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

Burns required small persuasion, and while Thomson 
asked for strains delicate and polished, the poet character- 
istically stipulated that his contributions were to be with- 
out remuneration, and the language seasoned with a 
sprinkling of the Scottish dialect. As his heart was much 
in the matter, he began to pour out verse with a readiness 
and talent unknown in the history of song : his engage- 
ment with Thomson, and his esteem for Johnson, gave 
birth to a series of songs as brilliant as varied, and as 
naturally easy as they were gracefully original. In look- 
ing over those very dissimilar collections it is not difficult 
to discover that the songs which he wrote for the more 
stately work, while they are more polished and elegant 
than those which he contributed to the less pretending 
one, are at the same time less happy in their humor and 
less simple in their pathos. " What pleases me as simple 
and naive," says Burns to Thomson, " disgusts you as 
ludicrous and low. For this reason * Fye, gie me my 
coggie, sirs, * Fye, let us a' to the bridal," with several 
others of that cast, are to me highly pleasing, while * Saw 
ye my Father' delights me with its descriptive simple 
pathos :" we read in these words the reasons of the dif- 
ference between the lyrics of the two collections. 

The land where the poet lived furnished ready mate- 
rials for song : hills with fine woods, vales with clear 
waters, and dames as lovely as any recorded in verse, 
were to be had in his walks and his visits ; while, for the 
purposes of mirth or of humor, characters, in whose faces 
originality was legibly written, were as numerous in 
Nithsdale as he had found them in the west. He had 
been reproached, while in Kyle, with seeing charms in 
very ordinary looks, and hanging the garlands of the muse 
on unlovely altars ; he was liable to no such censure in 



J 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 141 

Nithsdale ; he poured out the incense of poetry only on 
the fair and captivating : his Jeans, his Lucys, his Phil- 
lises, and his Jessies were ladies of such mental or per- 
sonal charms as the Reynolds's and the Lawrences of the 
time would have rejoiced to lay out their choicest colors 
on. But he did not limit himself to the charms of those 
whom he could step out to the walks and admire : his ly- 
rics give evidence of the wandering of his thoughts to the 
distant or the dead — he loves to remember Charlotte 
Hamilton and Mary Campbell, and think of the sighs and 
vows on the Devon and the Doon, while his harpstrings 
were still quivering to the names of the Millers and the 
M'Murdos — to the charms of the lasses with golden or 
with flaxen locks, in the valley where he dwelt. Of Jean 
M'Murdo and her sister Phillis he loved to sing ; and 
their beauty merited his strains : to one who died in her 
bloom, Lucy Johnston, he addressed a song of great sweet- 
ness ; to Jessie Le wars, two or three songs of gratitude and 
praise : nor did he forget other beauties, for the accom- 
plished Mrs. Riddel is remembered, and the absence of 
fair Clarinda is lamented in strains both impassioned and 
pathetic. 

But the main inspirer of the latter songs of Burns was 
a young woman of humble birth : of a form equal to tlTe 
most exquisite proportions of sculpture, with bloom on 
her cheeks, and merriment in her large bright eyes, 
enough to drive an amatory poet crazy. Her name was 
Jean Lorimer ; she was not more than seventeen when 
the poet made her acquaintance, and though she had got 
a sort of brevet-right from an officer in .the army, to use 
his southern name of Whelpdale, she loved best to be 
addressed by her maiden designation, while the poet chose 
to veil her in the numerous lyrics, to which she gave life, 



142 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

under the names of " Chloris," " The lass of Craigie- 
burnwood," and " The lassie wi' the lintwhite locks." 
Though of a temper not much inclined to conceal any- 
thing, Burns complied so tastefully with the growing 
demand of the age for the exterior decencies of life, that 
when the scrupling dames of Caledonia sung a new song 
in her praise, they were as unconscious whence its beau- 
ties came, as is the lover of art, that the shape and the 
gracefulness of the marble nymph which he admires, are 
derived from a creature who sells the use of her charais 
indifferently to sculpture or to love. Fine poetry, like 
other arts called fine, springs from " strange places," as 
the flower in the fable said, when it bloomed on the dung- 
hill ; nor is Burns more to be blamed than was Raphael, 
who painted Madonnas, and Magdalens with dishevelled 
hair and lifted eyes, from a loose lady, whom the pope, 
" Holy at Rome — here Antichrist," charitably prescribed 
to the artist, while he labored in the cause of the church. 
Of the poetic use which he made of Jean Lorimer's 
charms, Bums gives this account to Thomson. " The 
lady on whom the song of Craigie-burnwood was made 
is one of the finest women in Scotland, and in fact is to 
me in a manner what Sterne's Eliza was to him — a mis- 
tress, or a friend, or what you will, in the guileless sim- 
jDlicity of Platonic love. I assure you that to my lovely 
friend you are indebted for many of my best songs. Do 
you think that the sober gin-horse routine of existence 
could inspire a man with life and love and joy — could 
fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos, 
equal to the genius of your book I No ! no ! When- 
ever I want to be more than ordinary in song — to be 
in some degree equal to your diviner airs — do you 
imagine I fast and pray for the celestial emanation 1 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. , 143 

Quite the contrary. I have a glorious recipe ; the very- 
one that for his own use was invented by the divinity of 
heaUng and poesy, when erst he piped to the flocks of 
Admetus. I put myself in a regimen of admiring a fine 
woman ; and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, 
in proportion are you delighted with my verses. The 
lightning of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus, and the 
witchery of her smile, the divinity of Helicon." 

Most of the songs which he composed under the influ- 
ences to which I have alluded are of the first order : 
''Bonnie Lesley," "Highland Mary," " Auld Rob Morris," 
" Duncan Gray," " Wandering Willie," " Meg o' the 
Mill," " The poor and honest sodger," " Bonnie Jean," 
" Phillis the fair," '' John Anderson my Jo," " Had I a 
cave on some wild distant shore," "Whistle and I'll come 
to you, my lad," ** Bruce's Address to his men at Ban- 
nockburn," " Auld Lang Syne," " Thine am I, my faith- 
ful fair," " Wilt thou be my dearie," " O Chloris mark 
how green the groves," " Contented wi' little, and cantie 
wi' mair," " Their groves of sweet myrtle," " Last May 
a braw w^ooer came down the lang glen," " O Mally's 
meek, Mally's sweet," " Hey for a lass wi' a tocher," 
" Here's a health to ane I loe dear," and the " Fairest 
maid on Devon banks." Many of the latter lyrics of 
Burns were more or less altered, to put them into better 
harmony with the airs, and I am not the only one who 
has wondered that a bard so impetuous and intractable in 
most matters, should have become so soft and pliable, as 
to make changes which too often sacrificed the poetry for 
the sake of a fuller and more swelling sound. It is true 
that the emphatic notes of the music must find their echo 
in the emphatic words of the verse, and that words soft 
and liquid are fitter for ladies' lips, than words hissing 



144 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

and rough ; but it is also true that in changing a harsher 
word for one more harmonious, the sense often suffers, 
and that happiness of expression, and that dance of words 
which lyric verse requires, lose much of their life and 
vigor. The poet's favorite walk in composing his songs 
was on a beautiful green sward, on the northern side of 
the Nith, opposite Lincluden ; and his favorite posture 
for composition at home was balancing himself on the 
hind legs of his arm-chair. 

While indulging in these lyrical flights, politics pene- 
trated into Nithsdale, and disturbed the tranquillity of 
that secluded region. First, there came a contest for the 
representation of the Dumfries boroughs, between Patrick 
Miller, younger, of Dalswinton, and Sir James Johnstone, 
of Westerhall, and some two years afterwards, a struggle 
for the representation of the county of Kirkudbright, 
between the interest of the Stewarts, of Galloway, and 
Patrick Heron, of Kerroughtree, In the first of these 
the poet mingled discretion with his mirth, and raised a 
hearty laugh, in which both j)arties joined ; for this sobri- 
ety of temper, good reasons may be assigned : Miller, 
the elder, of Dalswinton, had desired to oblige him in 
the affair of Ellisland, and his firm and considerate friend 
M'Murdo, of Drumlanrig, was chamberlain to his Grace 
of Queensbury, on whose interest Miller stood. On the 
other hand, his old jacobitical affections made him the 
secret well-wisher to Westerhall, for up to this time, at 
least till acid disaj^pointment and the democratic doctrine 
of the natural equality of man influenced him. Burns, or 
as a western rhymer of his day and district worded the 
reproach — Rob was a Tory. His situation, it will there- 
fore be observed, disposed him to moderation, and ac- 
counts for the milkiness of his Epistle to Fintry, in which 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 145 

he marshals the chiefs of the contending factions, and 
foretells the fierceness of the strife,' without pretending 
to foresee the event. Neither is he more exj^licit, though 
infinitely more humorous, in his ballad of " The Five 
Carlins," in which he impersonates the five boroughs — 
Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Lochmaben, Sanquhar, and 
Annan, and draws their characters as shrewd and calcu- 
lating dames, met in much wrath and drink to choose a 
representative. 

But the two or three years which elapsed between the 
election for the boroughs, and that for the county adjoin- 
ing, wrought a serious change in the temper as well as 
the opinions of the poet. His Jacobitism, as has been 
said, was of a poetic kind, and put on in obedience to old 
feelings, and made no part of the man : he was in his 
heart as democratic as the kirk of Scotland, which edu- 
cated hinr — he acknowledged no other superiority but 
the mental : "he was disposed too," said Professor Walker, 
** from constitutional temper, from education and the 
accidents of life, to a jealousy of power, and a keen 
hostility against every system which enabled birth and 
opulence to anticipate those rewards which he conceived 
to belong to genius and virtue." When we add to this, 
a resentment of the injurious treatment of the dispensers 
of public patronage, who had neglected his claims, and 
showered pensions and places on men unworthy of being 
named with him, we have assigned causes for the change 
of side and the tone of asperity and bitterness, infused 
into " The Heron Ballads." Formerly honey was mixed 
with gall ; a little praise sweetened his censure : in these 
election lampoons he is fierce, and even venomous : — no 
man has a head but what is empty, nor a heart that is not 
black : men descended without reproach from lines of 
13 



146 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

heroes are stigmatized as cowards, and the honest and 
conscientious are reproached as miserly, mean, and disho- 
norable. Such is the spirit of party. '* I have privately," 
thus writes the poet to Heron, "printed a good many 
copies of the ballads, and have sent them among friends 
about the country. You have already, as your auxiliary, 
the sober detestation of mankind, on the heads of your 
opponents ; and I swear by the lyre of Thalia, to muster 
on your side all the votaries of honest laughter and fair, 
candid ridicule." The ridicule was uncandid, and the 
laughter dishonest. The poet was unfortunate in his 
political attachments : Miller gained the boroughs which 
Bums wished he might lose, and Heron lost the county 
which he foretold he would gain. It must also be re- 
corded against the good taste of the poet, that he loved to 
recite " The Heron Ballads," and reckon them among 
his happiest compositions. 

From attacking others, the poet was — in the interval 
between penning these election lampoons — called on to 
defend himself; for this he seems to have been quite 
unprepared, though in those yeasty times he might have 
expected it. "I have been surjDrised, confounded, and 
distracted," he thus w^rites to Graham, of Fintry, " by 
Mr. Mitchell, the collector, telling me that he has received 
an order from your board to inquire into my political 
conduct, and blaming me as a person disaffected to Gov- 
ernment. Sir, you are a husband and a father : you know 
what you would feel, to see the much-loved wife of your 
bosom, and your helpless, prattling little ones, turned adrift 
into the world, degraded and disgraced, from a situation in 
which they had been respectable and respected. I would 
not tell a deliberate falsehood, no, not though even worse 
horrors, if worse can be, than those I have mentioned, 



LIFE OP ROBERT BURNS. 147 

hung over my head, and I say that the allegation, what- 
ever villain has made it, is a lie ! To the British consti- 
tution, on Revolution principles, next after my God, I am 
devotedly attached. To your patronage as a man of some 
genius, you have allowed me a claim ; and your esteem 
as an honest man I know is my due. To these, sir, 
permit me to appeal : by the^ I adjure you to save me 
from that misery which threatens to overwhelm me, and 
which with my latest breath I will say I have not de- 
served." In this letter another, intended for the eye of 
the Commissioners of the Board of Excise, was enclosed, 
in which he disclaimed entertaining the idea of a British 
republic — a wild drama of the day — but stood by the 
principles of the constitution of 16S8, with the wish to 
see such corruptions as had crept in, amended. This 
last remark, it appears, by a letter from the poet to 
Captain Erskine, afterwards Earl of Mar, gave great 
offence, for Corbet, one of the superiors, was desired to 
inform him, " that his business was to act, and not to think ; 
and that whatever might be men or measures, it was his 
duty to be silent and obedient." The intercession of 
Fintry, and the explanations of Burns, were so far effec- 
tual, that his political offence was forgiven, " only I 
understand," said he, *' that all hopes of my getting 
officially forward are blasted." The records of the Ex- 
cise Office exhibit no trace of this memorable matter, 
and two noblemen, who were then in the government, 
have assured me that this harsh proceeding received no 
countenance at head-quarters, and must have originated 
with some ungenerous or malicious person, on whom the 
poet had spilt a little of the nitric acid of his wrath. 

That Burns was numbered among the republicans of 
Dumfries I well remember ; but then those who held dif- 



148 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

ferent sentiments from the men in power, were all, in 
that loyal town, stigmatized as democrats : that he either 
desired to see the constitution changed, or his country 
invaded by the liberal -French, who proposed to set us fi'ee 
with the bayonet, and then admit us to the " fraternal 
embrace," no one ever believed. It is true that he spoke 
of premiers and peers with contempt ; that he hesitated 
to take off his hat in the theatre, to the air of *' God save 
the king ;" that he refused to drink the health of Pitt, 
saying he preferred that of Washington — a far greater 
man : that he wrote bitter words against that combination 
of princes, who desired to put down freedom in France ; 
that he said the titled spurred and the wealthy switched 
England and Scotland like two hack-horses ; and that all 
the high-places of the land, instead of being filled by 
genius and talent, were occupied, as were the high-places 
of Israel, with idols of wood or of stone. But all this 
and more had been done and said before by thousands in 
this land, whose love of their country was never question- 
ed. That it was bad taste to refuse to remove his hat 
when other neads were bared, and little better to refuse 
to pledge in company the name of Pitt, because he pre- 
ferred Washington, cannot admit of a doubt ; but that he 
deserved to be written down traitor, for mere matters of 
whim or caprice, or to be turned out of the unenvied 
situation of " gauging auld wives' barrels," because he 
thous^ht there w^ere some stains on the white robe of the 
constitution, seems a sort of tyranny new in the history of 
oppression. His love of- country is recorded in too many 
undying lines to admit of a doubt now : nor is it that 
chivalrous love alone which men call romantic ; it is a 
love which may be laid up in every man's heart and 



LIFE OP ROBERT BURNS. 149 

practised in every man's life ; the words are homely, but 
the words of Burns are always expressive : — 

" The kettle of the kii'k and state 

Perhaps a clout may fail in't, 
But deil a foreign tinkler loon 

Shall ever ca' a nail in't. 
Be Briton's still to Britons true, 

Amang ourselves united; 
For never but by British hands 

Shall British wrongs be righted." 

But while verses, deserving as these do to become the 
national motto, and sentim&nts loyal and generous, were 
overlooked and forgotten, all his rash words about free- 
dom, and his sarcastic sallies about thrones and kings, 
were treasured up to his injury, by the mean and the 
malicious. His steps were watched and his words 
weighed ; when he talked with a friend in the street, he 
was supposed to utter sedition ; and when ladies retired 
from the table, and the wine circulated with closed doors, 
he was suspected of treason rather than of toasting, 
which he often did with much humor, the charms of 
woman ; even when he gave as a sentiment, " May our 
success be equal to the justice of our cause," he was 
liable to be challenged by some gunpowder captain, who 
thought we deserved success in war, whether right or 
wrong. It is true that he hated with a most cordial 
hatred all who presumed on their own consequence, whe- 
ther arising from wealth, titles, or commissions in the 
army ; officers he usually called "the epauletted puppies," 
and lords he generally spoke of as ** feather-headed fools," 
who could but strut and stare and be insolent. All this 
was not to be endured meekly : scorn was answered with 
scorn ; and having no answer in kind to retort his satiric 
13* 



150 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

flings, his unfriends reported that it was unsafe for young 
men to associate with one whose principles were demo- 
cratic, and scarcely either modest or safe for young 
women to listen to a poet whose notions of female virtue 
were so loose and his songs so free. These sentiments 
prevailed so far that a gentleman on a visit from London, 
told me he was dissuaded from inviting Burns to a dinner, 
given by way of welcome back to his native place, because 
he was the associate of democrats and loose people ; and 
when a modest dame of Dumfries expressed, through a 
friend, a wish to have but the honor of speaking to one 
of whose genius she was an admirer, the poet declined 
the interview, with a half-serious smile, saying, " Alas ! 
she is handsome, and you know the character publicly 
assigned to me." She escaped the danger of being num- 
bered, it is likely, with the Annas and the Chlorises of his 
freer strains. 

The neglect of his country, the tyranny of the Excise, 
and the downfall of his hopes and fortunes, were now 
to bring forth their fruits — the poet's health began to 
decline. His drooping looks, his neglect of his person, 
his solitary saunterings, his escape from the stings of 
reflection into socialities, and his distempered joy in the 
company of beauty, all spoke, as plainly as with a tongue, 
of a sinking heart and a declining body. Yet though he 
was sensible of sinking health, hope did not at once desert 
him : he continued to pour out such tender strains, and to 
show such flashes of wit and humor, at the call of Thom- 
son, as are recorded of no other lyrist : neither did he, 
when in company after his own mind, hang the head, and 
speak mournfully, but talked and smiled and still charmed 
all listeners by his witty vivacities. 

On the 26th of June 1796, he writes thus of his fortunes 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 151 

and condition to his friend Clarke, " Still, still the victim 
of affliction ; were you to see the emaciated figure who 
now holds the pen to you, you would not know your old 
friend. Whether I shall ever get about again is only 
known to Him, the Great Unknown, whose creature I 
am. Alas, Clarke, I begin to fear the worst ! As to my 
individual self I am tranquil, and would despise myself 
if I were not ; but Burns's poor widow and half-a-dozen 
of his dear little ones, helpless orphans ! Here I am as 
weak as a woman's tear. Enough of this ! 'tis half my 
disease. I duly received your last, enclosing the note; it 
came extremely in time, and I am much obliged to your 
punctuality. Again I must request you to do me the 
same kindness. Be so very good as by return of post to 
enclose me another note : I trust you can do so without 
inconvenience, and it will seriously oblige me. If I must 
go, I leave a few friends behind me, whom I shall regret 
while consciousness remains. I know I shall live in their 
remembrance. O, dear, dear Clarke ! that I shall ever 
see you again is I am afraid highly improbable." This 
remarkable letter proves both the declining health, and 
the poverty of the poet : his digestion was so bad that he 
could taste neither flesh nor fish : porridge and milk he 
could alone swallow, and that but in small quantities. 
When it is recollected that he had no more than thirty 
shillings a week to keep house, and live like a gentleman, 
no one need wonder that his wife had to be obliged to a 
generous neighbor for some of the chief necessaries for 
her coming confinement, and that the poet- had to beg, in 
extreme need, two guinea notes from a distant friend. 

His sinking state was not unobserved by his friends, 
and Syme and M'Murdo united with Dr. Maxwell in per- 
suading him, at the beginning of the summer, to seek 



152 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

health at the Brow-well, a few miles east from Dumfries, 
w4iere there were pleasant walks on the Solway-side, and 
salubrious breezes from the sea, which it was expected 
would bring the health to the poet they had brought to 
many. For a while, his looks brightened up, and health 
seemed inclined to return : his friend, the witty and 
accomplished Mrs. Riddel, who was herself ailing, paid 
him a visit. " I was struck," she said, with his apjjear- 
ance on entering the room : the stamp of death was 
impressed on his features. His first words were, * Well, 
Madam, have you any commands for the other world V 
I replied that it seemed a doubtful case which of us 
should be there soonest ; he looked in my face with an air 
of great kindness, and expressed his concern at seeing 
me so ill, with his usual sensibility. At table he ate little 
or nothing : we had a long conversation about his present 
state, and the approaching termination of all his earthly 
prospects. He showed great concern about his literary 
fame, and particularly the publication of his posthumous 
works ; he said he was well aware that his death would 
occasion some noise, and that every scrap of his writing 
would be revived against him, to the injury of his future 
reputation ; that letters and verses, written with unguard- 
ed freedom, would be handed about by vanity or malevo- 
lence, when no dread of his resentment would restrain 
them, or prevent malice or envy from pouring forth their 
venom on his name. I had seldom seen his mind greater, 
or more collected. There was frequently a considerable 
degree of vivacity in his sallies ; but the concern and 
dejection I could not disguise, damped the spirit of 
pleasantry he seemed willing to indulge." This was on 
the evening of the 5th of July ; another lady who called 
to see him, found him seated at a window, gazing on the 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 153 

sun, then setting brightly on the summits of the green 
hills of Nithsdale. " Look how lovely the sun is," said 
the poet, ** but he will soon have done with shining for 
me." 

He sow longed for home : his wife, whom he ever ten- 
derly loved, was about to be confined in child-bed: his 
papers were in sad confusion, and required arrangement ; 
and he felt that desire to die, at least among familiar 
things and friendly faces, so common to our nature. He 
had not long before, though much reduced in pocket, 
refused with scorn an offer of fifty pounds, which a specu- 
lating bookseller made, for leave to publish his looser 
compositions : he had refused an offer of the like sum 
yearly, from PeiTy of the Morning Chronicle, for poetic 
contributions to his paper, lest it might embroil him with 
the ruling powers, and he had resented the remittance of 
five pounds from Thomson, on account of his lyric con- 
tributions, and desired him to do so no more, unless he 
wished to quarrel with him : but his necessities now, and 
they had at no time been so great, induced him to solicit 
five pounds from Thomson, and ten pounds from his 
cousin, James Burness, of Montrose, and to beg his friend 
Alexander Cunningham to intercede with the Commis- 
sioners of Excise, to depart from their usual practice, 
and grant him his full salary ; for without that, he added, 
" If I die not of disease, 1 must perish with hunger." 
Thomson sent the five pounds, James Burness sent the ten, 
but the Commissioners of Excise refused to be either 
merciful or generous. Stobie, a young expectant in the 
customs, was both ; — he performed the duties of the 
dying poet, and refused to touch the salary. The mind 
of Burns was haunted with the fears of want and the 
terrors of a jail ; nor were those fears without foundation ; 



154 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

one Williamson, to whom he was indebted for the cloth 
to make his volunteer regimentals, threatened the one ; 
and a feeling that he was without money for either his 
own illness or the confinement of his wife, threatened the 
other. 

Burns returned from the Brow- well, on the 18th of 
July : as he walked from the little carriage which brought 
him up the Mill hole-brae to his own door, he trembled 
much, and stooped with weakness and pain, and kept his 
feet with difficulty; hislooks were woe-worn and ghastly, 
and no one who saw him, and there were several, 
expected to see him again in life. It was soon circulated 
through Dumfries, that Burns had returned worse from 
the Brow- well ; that Maxwell thought ill of him, and that, 
in truth, he was dying. The anxiety of all classes was 
great, differences of opinion were forgotten, in sympathy 
for his early fate ; wherever two or three were met 
together their talk was of Burns, of his rare wit, match- 
less humor, the vivacity of his conversation, and the kind- 
ness of his heart. To the poet himself, death, which he 
now knew was at hand, brought with it no fear ; his 
good-humor, which small matters alone ruffled, did not 
forsake him, and his wit was ever ready. He was poor 
— he gave his pistols, which he had used against the 
smugglers on the Solway, to his physician, adding with a 
smile, that he had tried them and found them an honor 
to their maker, which was more than he could say of the 
bulk of mankind ! He was proud — he remembered the 
indifferent practice of the corps to which he belonged, 
and turning to Gibson, one of his fellow-soldiers, who 
stood at his bed-side with wet eyes, ** John," said he, and 
a gleam of humor passed over his face, " pray don't let 
the awkward -squad fire over me." It was almost the last act 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 155 

of his life to copy into his Common-place Book, the letters 
which contained the charge against him of the Commis- 
sioners of Excise, and his own eloquent refutation, lea- 
ving judgment to be pronounced by the candor of 
posterity. 

It has been injuriously said of Burns, by Coleridge, 
that the man sunk, but the poet was bright to the last : 
he did not sink in the sense that these words imply : the 
man was manly to the latest draught of breath. That he 
was a poet to the last, can be proved by facts, as well as 
by the word of the author of Christabel. As he lay 
silently growing weaker and weaker, he observed Jessie 
Lewars, a modest and beautiful young creature, and 
sister to one of his brethren of the Excise, watching over 
him with moist eyes, and tending him with the care of 
a daughter, he rewarded her with one of those songs 
which are an insurance against forgetfulness. The 
lyrics of the north have nothing finer than this exquisite 
stanza : — ' 

'• Altho' thou maun never be mine, 
Altho' even hope is denied, 
'Tis sweeter for thee despairing, 
Than aught in the world beside." 

His thoughts as he lay wandered to Charlotte Hamilton, 
and he dedicated some beautiful stanzas to her beauty 
and her coldness, beginning, " Fairest maid on Devon 
banks." 

It was a sad sight to see the poet gradually sinking ; 
his wife in hourly expectation of her sixth confinement, 
and his four helpless children — a daughter, a sweet 
child, had died the year before — with no one of their 
lineage to soothe them with kind words or minister to 
their wants, Jessie Lewars, with equal prudence and 



156 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

attention, watched over them all : she could not help seeing 
that the thoughts of the desolation which his death would 
bring pressed sorely on him, for he loved his children, 
and hoped much from his boys. He wrote to his father- 
in-law, James Armour, at Mauchline, that he was dying, 
his wife nigh her confinement, and begged that his mother- 
in-law would hasten to them and speak comfort. He 
wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, saying, " I have written to you 
so often without receiving any answer, that I would not 
trouble you again, but for the circumstances in which I 
am. An illness which has long hung about me in all 
^probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne 
whence no traveller returns. Your friendship, with 
which for many years you honored me, was a friendship 
dearest to my soul : your conversation and your corres- 
pondence were at once highly entertaining and instructive 
— with what pleasure did I use to break up the seal ! 
The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor 
palpitating heart. Farewell !" A tremor pervaded his 
frame ; his tongue grew parched, and he was at times 
delirious : on the fourth day after his return, when his 
attendant James Macliire, held his medicine to his lips, 
he swallowed it eagerly, rose almost wholly up, sjnead 
out his hands, sprang forward nigh the whole length of 
the bed, fell on his face, and expired. He died on the 
21st of July, when nearly thirty-seven years and seven 
months old. 

The burial of Burns, on the 25th of July, was an im- 
pressive and mournful scene : half the people of Nithsdale 
and the neighboring j^arts of Galloway had crowded into 
Dumfries, to see their poet ** mingled with the earth," 
and not a few had been permitted to look at his body, 
laid out for interment. It was a calm and beautiful day, 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 157 

and as the body was borne along the street towards the 
old kirk-yard, by his brethren of the volunteers, not a 
sound was heard but the measured step and the solemn 
music : there was no impatient crushing, no fierce elbow- 
ing — the crowd which filled the street seemed conscious 
what they were now losing forever. Even while this 
pageant was passing, the widow of the poet was taken 
in labor ; but the infant born in that unhappy hour soon 
shared his father's gi'ave. On reaching the northern nook 
of the kirk-yard, where the grave was made, the mourn- 
ers halted ; the coffin was divested of the mort-cloth, and 
silently lowered to its resting-place, and as the first shovel- 
full of earth fell on the lid, the volunteers, too agitated to 
be steady, justified the fears of the jDoet, by three ragged 
volleys. He who now writes this very brief and imperfect 
account was present : he thought then, as he thinks now, 
that all the military array of foot and horse did not harmo- 
nize with either the genius or the fortunes of the poet, 
and that the tears which he saw on many cheeks around, 
as the earth was replaced, were worth all the splendor of 
a show which mocked with unintended mockery the burial 
of the poor and neglected Burns. The body of the poet 
was, on the 5th of June, 1815, removed to a more com- 
modious spot in the same burial-ground — his dark, waving 
locks looked then fresh and glossy — to afford room for a 
marble monument, which embodies, with neither skill nor 
grace, that well-known passage in the dedication to the 
gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt : *' The poetic genius of 
my country found me, as the prophetic bard, Elijah, did Eli- 
sha, atthe plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over me." 
The dust of the bard was again disturbed, when the body 
of Mrs. Burns was laid, in April, 1834, beside the remains 
of her husband : his skull was dug up by the district 
14 



l^r— 



158 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

craniologists, to satisfy their minds by measurement that 
he was equal to the composition of" Tam o' Shanter," or 
" Mary in Heaven." This done, they placed, the skull in 
a leaden box, " carefully lined with the softest materials," 
and. returned it, we hope for ever, to the hallowed ground. 
Thus lived and died Robert Burns, the chief of Scottish 
poets : in his person he was tall and sinewy, and of such 
strength and activity, that Scott alone, of all the poets I 
have seen, seemed his equal : his forehead was broad, 
his hair black, with an inclination to curl, his visage 
uncommonly swarthy, his eyes large, dark, and lustrous, 
and his voice deep and manly. His sensibility was strong, 
his passions full to overflowing, and he loved, nay, adored, 
whatever was gentle and beautiful. He had, when a lad 
at the plough, an eloquent word and an inspired song 
for every fair face that smiled on him, and a sharp sarcasm 
or a fierce lampoon for every rustic who thwarted or 
contradicted him. As his first inspiration came from love, 
he continued through life to love on, and was as ready 
with the lasting incense of the muse for the ladies of 
Nithsdale as for the lasses of Kyle : his earliest song was 
in praise of a young girl who reaped by his side, when 
he was seventeen — his latest in honor of a lady by whose 
side he had wandered and dreamed on the banks of the 
Devon. He was of a nature proud and suspicious, and 
towards the close of his life seemed disposed to regard all 
above him in rank as men who unworthily possessed the 
patrimony of genius ; he desired to see the order of nature 
restored, and worth and talent in precedence of the base 
or the dull. He had no medium in his hatred or his love : 
he never spared the stupid, as if they were not to be en- 
dured because he was bright ; and on the heads of the 
innocent possessors of titles or wealth he was ever ready 



LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 159 

to shower his lampoons. He loved to start doubts in 
religion which he knew inspiration only could solve, and 
he spoke of Calvinism with a latitude of language that 
grieved pious listeners. He was warm-hearted and 
generous to a degree, above all men, and scorned all that 
was selfish and mean with a scorn quite romantic. He 
was a steadfast ^friend and a good neighbor : while he 
lived at Ellisland few passed his door without being 
entertained at his table ; and even when in poverty, on 
the Millhole-brae, the poor seldom left his door but with 
blessings on their lips. 

Of his modes of study he has himself informed us, as 
well as of the seasons and places in which he loved to 
muse. He composed while he strolled along the seclu- 
ded banks of the Doon, the Ayr, or the Nith ; as the 
images crowded on his fancy his pace became quickened, 
and in his highest moods he was excited even to tears. He 
loved the winter for its leafless trees, its swelling floods, 
and its winds which swept along the gloomy sky, with 
frost and snow on their wings ; but he loved the autumn 
more — he has neglected to say why — the muse was then 
more liberal of her favors, and he composed with a hapj^y 
alacrity unfelt in all other seasons. He filled his mind 
and heart with the materials of song — and retired from 
gazing on woman's beauty, and from the excitement of her 
charms, to record his impressions in verse, as a painter de- 
lineates on his canvas the looks of those who sit to his pen- 
cil. His chief place of study at Ellisland is still remem- 
bered : it extends along the river-bank, towards the Isle : 
there the neighboring gentry love to walk and peasants 
to gather, and hold it sacred, as the place where he com- 
posed Tam o' Shanter. His favorite place of study, 
when residing in Dumfries, was the ruins of Lincluden 



160 ' LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

College, made classic by that sublime ode, " The Vision," 
and that level and clovery sward contiguous to the Col- 
lege, on the northern side of the Nith : the latter place 
was his favorite resort ; it is known now by the name of 
Burns's musing ground, and there he conceived many of 
his latter lyrics. In case of interruption he completed the 
verses at the fireside, where he swung to and fro in his 
arm-chair till the task was done : he then submitted the 
song to the ordeal of his wife's voice, which was both 
sweet and clear, and while she sung he listened atten- 
tively, and altered or amended till the whole was in har- 
mony, music and words. 

The genius of Burns is of a high order : in brightness 
of expression and unsolicited ease and natural vehemence 
of language, he stands in the first rank of poets : in choice 
of subjects, in happiness of conception, and loftiness of 
imagination, he recedes into the second. He owes little 
of his fame to his subjects, for, saving the beauty of a few 
ladies, they were all of an ordinary kind : he sought 
neither in romance nor in history for themes to the muse ; 
he took up topics from life around which were familiar to 
all, and endowed them with character, with passion, with 
tenderness, with humor — elevating all that he touched 
into the regions of poetry and morals. He went to no 
far lands for the purpose of surprising us with wonders, 
neither did he go to crowns or coronets to attract the 
stare of the peasantry around him, by things which to them 
were as a book shut and sealed : " The Daisy" grew on 
the lands which he ploughed ; " The Mouse" built her 
frail nest on his own stubble-field ; " The Haggis" reeked 
on his own table ; " The Scotch Drink" of which he 
sang was the produce of a neighboring still ; " The Twa 
Dogs," which conversed so wisely and wittily, were, one 



LIFE OP ROBERT BURNS. 161 

of them at least, his own collies ; ** The Vision" is but 
a picture, and a brilliant one, of his own hopes and fears ; 
"Tarn Samson" was a friend whom he loved ; " Doctor 
Hornbook" a neighboring pedant ; ''Matthew Hender- 
son " a social captain on half-pay ; ** The Scotch Bard" 
who had gone to the West Indies was Bums himself; 
the heroine of " The Lament" was Jean Armour ; and 
" Tam o' Shanter" a facetious farmer of Kyle, who rode 
late and loved pleasant company, nay, even " The Deil" 
himself, whom he had the hardihood to address, was a 
being whose eldrich croon had alarmed the devout matrons 
of Kyle, and had wandered, not unseen by the bard him- 
self, among the lonely glens of the Doon. Burns was 
one of the first to teach the world that high mioral poetry 
resided in the humblest subjects : whatever he touched 
became elevated ; his spirit possessed and inspired the 
commonest topics, and endowed them with life and beauty. 
His songs have all the beauties and but few of them the 
faults of his poems : they flow to the music as readily as 
if both air and words came into the world together. The 
sentiments are from nature, they are rarely strained or 
forced, and the words dance in their places and echo the 
music in its pastoral sweetness, social glee, or in the 
tender and the moving. He seems always to write with 
woman's eye upon him : he is gentle, persuasive and 
impassioned : he appears to watch her looks, and pours 
out his praise or his complaint according to the changeful 
moods of her mind. He looks on her, too, with a sculp- 
tor's as well as a poet's eye : to him who works in marble, 
the diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and elaborate ornaments 
of gold, but load and injure the harmony of proportion, 
the grace of form, and divinity of sentiment of his nymph 
or his goddess — so with Burns the fashion of a lady's 
14* 



162 LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 

bodice, the lustre of her satins, or the sparkle of her dia- 
monds, or other finery with which wealth or taste has 
loaded her, are neglected as idle frippery ; while her 
beauty, her form, or her mind, matters which are of 
nature, and not of fashion, are remembered and praised. 
He is none of the millinery bards, who deal in scented 
silks, spider-net laces, rare gems, set in rarer workman- 
ship, and who shower diamonds and pearls by the bushel 
on a lady's locks : he makes bright eyes, flushing cheeks, 
the magic of the tongue, and the " pulses' maddening 
play" perform all. His songs are, in general, pastoral 
pictures : he seldom finishes a portrait of female beauty 
without enclosing it in a natural frame-work of waving 
woods, running streams, the melody of birds, and the 
lights of heaven. Those who desire to feel Bums in all his 
force, must seek some summer glen, when a country girl 
searches among his many songs for one which sympathizes 
with her own heart, and gives it full utterance, till wood 
and vale is filled with the melody. It is remarkable that 
the most naturally elegant and truly impassioned songs in 
our literature were written by a ploughman in honor of 
the rustic lasses around him. 

His poetry is all life and energy, and bears the impress 
of a warm heart and a clear understanding ; it abounds 
with passions and opinions — vivid pictures of rural hap- 
piness and the raptures of successful love, all fresh from 
nature and observation, and not as they are seen through 
the spectacles of books. The wit of the clouted shoe is 
there without its coarseness : there is a prodigality of 
humor without licentiousness, a pathos ever natural and 
manly, a social joy akin sometimes to sadness, a melan- 
choly not un allied to mirth, and a sublime morality which 
seeks to elevate and soothe. To a love of ihan he added 



LIFE OP ROBERT BURNS. 163 

an affection for the flowers of the valley, the fowls of the 
air, and the beasts of the field : he perceived the tie of 
social sympathy which united animated with unanimated 
nature, and in many of his finest poems most beautifully 
he has enforced it. His thoughts are original and his 
style new and unborrowed : all that he has written is 
distinguished by a happy carelessness, a bounding elasti- 
city of spirit, and a singular felicity of expression, simple 
yet inimitable ; he is familiar, yet dignified, careless, yet 
correct, and concise, yet clear and full. All this and 
much more is embodied in the language of humble life 
— a dialect reckoned barbarous by scholars, but which, 
coming from the lips of inspiration, becomes classic and 
elevated. 

The prose of this great poet has much of the original 
merit of his verse, but it is seldom so natural and so sus- 
tained : it abounds with fine outflashings and with a 
genial warmth and vigor, but it is defaced by false orna- 
ment and by a constant anxiety to say fine and forcible 
things. He seems not to know that simplicity was as 
rare and as needful a beauty in prose as in verse ; he 
covets the pauses of Sterne and the point and antithesis 
of Junius, like one who believes that to write prose well 
he must be ever lively, ever pointed, and ever smart. Yet 
the account which he wrote of himself to Dr. Moore is one 
of the most spirited and natural naiTatives in the language, 
and composed in a style remote from the sti^ained and 
groped-for witticisms and put-on sensibilities of many 
of his letters : — '* Simple," as John Wilson says, " we 
may well call it; rich in fancy, overflowing in feel- 
ing, and dashed ofl* in every other j^ai'agraph with the 
easy boldness of a great master." 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 



ROBERT BURNS. 



' Now comes the sax-and-twentieth simmer, 
I've seen the bud upon the timmer." 



The looks of Burns still live in many men's memories; 
but as all such recollections perish, we shall soon have 
nought to trust to but the descriptions of biographers and 
the pictmings of artists. The truest and best of these 
are of course from the hands of men who had seen the 
poet, and were familiar with his ways. " His motions," 
says Professor Walker, who saw him when he first 
appeared amongst the wits and bloods of Edinburgh, 
" were firm and decided, and though without any preten- 
sions to grace, were at the same time so free from clown- 
ish constraint, as to show that he had not always been 
confined to the society of his profession. His counte- 
nance was manly and intelligent, and marked by a thought- 
ful gravity, which shaded at times into sternness. In his 
large dark eye the most striking index of his genius 
resided — it was full of mind." A much higher authority 
speaks of Burns in almost similar words : " I was," says 
Sir Walter Scott, " a lad of fifteen, in 1786-7, when he 



166 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

came first to Edinburgh : I would have given the world 
to know him ; as it was, I saw him one day at the late 
venerable Professor Ferguson's, where there were several 
gentlemen of literary reputation ; among whom I remem- 
ber the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. His person 
was strong and robust ; his manners rustic, not clownish ; 
a sort of dignified plaiimess and simplicity, which received 
part of its efl'ect, perhaps, from one's knowledge of his 
extraordinary talents. I think his countenance was more 
massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I would 
have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a 
very sagacious country farmer of the old Scottish school : 
there was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness 
in all his lineaments ; the eye alone, I think, indicated the 
poetical character and temperament. It was large, and 
of a dark cast, which glowed — I say, literally glowed — 
when he spoke with feeling or interest : I never saw such 
another eye in a human head, though I have seen the 
most distinguished men of my time." 

These two correct and striking pen-and-ink portraits of 
Burns are supported and illustrated by the likenesses 
made by the pencil. The earliest and truest, and best of 
these, in all respects, is that one painted for the poet by 
the now venerable Nasmyth, and for which he had the 
sittings when Burns was, as our motto intimates, in some- 
thing more than his six-and-twentieth summer. Though 
it has less of the bard in his inspired moods than those 
who knew him would wish, yet it has more of him than 
any other likeness has preserved — less massive and 
manly, but with much of the outward air of the man 
about it. It is most deficient in that brightness of look 
— that lightning-gleam of eye, of which he had more than 
any other son of song living within man's memory. 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 167 

Beugo, when he engraved the head for the first Edin- 
burgh edition of his poems, professed to restore all that 
Nasmyth missed, and caused Burns to sit whilst he 
touched up the plate from his face. All that the likeness 
gained by this was an increased swarthiness of hue ; but 
it lost the little which it had of the intellectual glow of 
the picture : — it is Burns — but Burns accursed and fall- 
en off, like Milton's angel, from his original brightness. 
The same portrait, lately engraved by Walker, has all 
that Nasmyth has preserved for us of Burns. The next 
best resemblance is the profile traced, the size of life, in 
1787, by Miers. I compared it with the cast of his skull, 
and with the portrait painted by Taylor : the skull estab- 
lished the accuracy of the profile, but both are at variance 
with the proportions of the painting, which, in spite of 
much excellent testimony in its favor, I regard as too 
inaccurate to be otherwise than spurious. 

Burns, as I write, seems to stand before me — such as 
he was when, escaping from the courtly circles of Edin- 
burgh, he came to try his fortune between the stilts of the 
plough on the banks of Nith. He was tall, sinewy, and 
vigorous, well placed on his limbs, formed for feats of 
activity and strength ; and the swarthiest of all Scotch- 
men I ever saw. In his ordinary moods he walked with 
a slight stoop; his brow was then dark, his eye dull,' and 
it seemed as if the spirit of God had gone out of him, and 
left but a lump of clay. On the coming of the muse, or 
the appearance of a friend, he became at once another 
man ; the ploughman-lout vanished, sunshine returned to 
his brow, a smile of winning sweetness to his lip, and the 
light almost insufferable, which Scott has described, to his 
eyes ; and he looked like a new-created thing, all bright- 
ness and joy. The expression of his face was as varied 



168 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

as his genius : there the mean or the high-souled found 
lowliness or loftiness in the spirit of their own natures, 
and spoke of the poet accordingly. Byron sneeringly 
said, Burns had as much dirt as deity about him ; yet, 
for all his proud birth and high fortune, the peer and the 
peasant seem of imagination all compact, — with this dif- 
ference ; the latter refused, when half-starving, the sum 
of fifty pounds for his indecorous songs ; while the former, 
in affluence, wrote and published his Don Juan to show 
that he held virtue to be an accident, and vice a certainty. 

" O wad some power the giftie gie us, 
To see ourselves as others see us !" 



BIRTH-PLACE OF BURNS. 



Robin Buins was born in Kvle." 



Burns, Ramsay, and Hogg, the three chiefs of the 
rustic or natural school of Scottish song, were born in 
what may be truly called pastoral districts of the Low- 
lands, and at no gi'eat way from each other. Robert was 
born on the Doon, at the distance of some five-and- 
twenty miles, as the crow flies, from the birth-place of 
Allan on the Glengonar ; while the cradle of James was 
rocked on the Ettrick, some five-and-twenty miles away 
from that of the author of the Gentle Shepherd, and in a 
land as wild as it is romantic. They were the sons of 
humble men, for Ramsay, with the blood of Dalhousie in 
his veins, was of a race of miners ; they were born too 
in very humble houses, and each on the bank of a stream, 
before their day little known in song, but which they 
lived to render immortal. Their strains too, — varied in 
their colors as the rainbow, — were all of their native 
land ; and though they were poets of very different orders, 
all they wrote and all they did was as effectually embla- 
zoned with the character of Scotland, as her banner is 
with her warning motto and her armed and blossomed 
thistle. They were three joyous good fellows, too, 
warm-hearted and social. 

The cottage in which Burns, — the greatest of the 
three, — was born, was raised by the hands of his father 
on Doonside, nigh to the town of Ayr, and close to the 
15 



170 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

old kirk of Alloway, It would seem to have been but a 
frail structure : a few days after his birth a rough wind 
ghook part of the gable and roof to the ground, and the 
swaddled poet was carried to the shelter of a neighbor- 
ing cottage. He loved, it is said, to allude to this when 
he grew up, and gayly claim commiseration for the stormy 
passions of one to whom a tempest had acted as hand- 
maid. In other days, a mason was seldom called in, and 
an architect never, to the construction of our northern 
shealings : the peasant marked out the ground-floor, near 
a stream, and in the shelter of wood or hill, of his pro- 
jected dwelling place : the wood- work, nearly as rough as 
when felled in the forest, was first framed and erected ; 
around the legs of the couples, or principal timbers of the 
roof, which generally stood on the ground, the rustic artist 
reared his walls of clay, straw, and stone ; shaped out his 
windows and his door, made his fire-side roomy, and then 
covered the whole in with turf and broom. The abode 
had a rough comfort about it, which atoned for want of ele- 
gance ; and with a well managed kale-yard behind the 
house, a spring-well probably nigh the door, and meal in 
the chest, and some books on the shelves, the " inventor 
and maker" of the shealing set up his staff", and with the 
wife of his bosom, commenced housekeeping. There is 
little either poetic or heroic in this, yet poets of a high 
order, and heroes of the truest stamp, have sprung from 
such hovels. 

The more classic poets of the land, Scott and Thom- 
son and others, are chiefly from the easterner Edinburgh 
side of the isle : while those of the rustic school. Burns 
and Ramsay and their followers, are from the western or 
Galloway side. In the latter district, comprehending 
once four or five counties, and ruled by princes of its own, 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 171 

the influence of classic lore prevailed less perhaps than 
in the other, which included the chief seat of govern- 
ment ; and its poets, thrown more into the bosom of 
nature, — or in other. words, on their own resources, — 
sought at hand, and found, all the materials of song which 
their more eastern brethren found, too readily sometimes, 
in the pages of Grreece and Rome. Thus in Ramsay we 
see no traces of foreign imitation ; his Gentle Shepherd, 
the only true pastoral of the island, is copied, language, 
scene, and sentiment, from his native glens : Burns went 
at once .and drank at the fountain-head, and obeying only 
the voice of nature, sang with a freedom, a manliness, and 
a grace, equal to the palmiest times of the muse : while 
Hogg, yielding to the wild and supernatural impulses of 
his fine imagination, sang a most romantic and wayward 
strain, but in which there is nothing, — not even a line, — 
of the romance of other lands ; all is of the Ettrick and 
the Yarrow — natural and national. 

The birth-place of Burns, like the dwelling-places of 
other bards, has had its revolutions. The houses in which 
Milton lived are cast down ; the home of Shakspeare has 
become a butcher's shop ; through part of the abode of 
Cowley the members of a turnpike trust have driven a 
road ; in the grove of Pope, the nightingale of Twicken- 
ham, birds, but not of song, roost and abide ; while in the 
cottage of Burns an alehouse keeper bottles off his bar- 
rels, and makes an honest penny of passers by, who halt 
to look at the place whence the great light of Scottish 
song came. All around are to be seen places made 
sacred by his muse : every hill has its fame ; every stream 
its praise ; every wood its immortality ; nor has the poet 
failed to consecrate in verse the rude structure which has 



172 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

been described. In the words uttered by the midwife in 
the hour of his birth, he indicates the fame which awaits 

him. \ 

\ " He'll be a credit to us a', 

\ We'll a' be proud of Robin." , 

A random sentiment of his own — but now the fixed 
opinion of mankind. 



TAM O' SHANTER. 



' So Maggie runs, the witches follow, 
Wi' mony an eldrich screech and hollow.' 



The scene of this most vivid and varied of all poems is 
on the banks of the Doon, and the story is embellished 
from tradition by the genius of the ^^oet. It has, so far, 
a foundation in truth : but men without fancy have striven 
to find for every image and incident a real and substantial 
origin, as if all the bright threads of the magic web of the 
story were spun from a veritable distaff, and the charac- 
ters and incidents which compose it had come, like sitters 
to a portrait painter, to have their likenesses transferred 
to the poet's canvas. A cupful of truth will color an 
ocean of fiction : Burns only emblazoned his tale with a 
few localities, to give it the air of the district, and never 
imagined that he was writing a story — 

" Whose accuracy all men durst swear for." 

Yet 1 have met with men, and critical ones, who averred 
that they had tippled with the real and original Tam o' 
Shanter, in the company of the miller and the smith ; had 
heard the souter tell his queerest stories, when the land- 
lord laughed and the landlady was condescending : and 
more than that, assert, that this poem, written on the 
banks of Nith, was conceived on those of Doon ; and that 
they knew the scenes where the characters of the drama 
dwelt ; and were intimate with Nanny, who wore the 
15* 



174 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

sark of Paisley ham, and had heard more of her spells 
than Burns had related. Those men no doubt believed 
what they asserted ; but they were ignorant of the ways 
of the muse ; they were unacquainted with her secrets 
of composition ; and as fancy was unknown to them, they 
supposed that Burns, like a portrait painter, could not 
paint truly without individual models. Well may we 
exclaim, with the poet of another isle — 

" What an impostor genius is !" 

The very scene which the poet's fancy has so strangely 
peopled, is seen through the poetic medium of a thunder- 
storm, and by a man excited by superstition and liquor. 
All that gives air and force to the tale is matter of imagi- 
nation. 

Of the realities embellished by the muse, something, 
however, may be said. I allude not to the HowfF in the 
town of Ayr, where Tam merrily prepared himself for 
the road ; nor to Doon, with all her floods spanned by a 
solitary arch ; but I mean the storm of rain and fire 
through which he galloped, and the images of fear and 
terror which in quick succession prepared him for the 
blazing kirk and its infernal inmates. " I seem to gain, 
in buffeting with the wind," says Sir Walter Scott, in 
his inimitable Diary for 1825, ** a little of the high spirit 
with which in younger days I used to enjoy a Tam o' 
Shanter ride through darkness, wind, and rain, the 
boughs gi^oaning and cracking over my head, the good 
horse free to the road and impatient for home, and feeling 
the weather as little as I did. 

* The storm around might rair and rustle, 
We didna mind the storm a whistle.' " 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 175 

If the intrepid poet of Marmion had taken a midnight 
gallop over the suspicious way where the stout farmer of 
Kyle rode, he might have thought less of the fire and the 
storm, than of the place where the pedlar perished in the 
snow ; the stone which broke the neck of tippling Charlie ; 
the caini where hunters found the murdered child, and 
the haunted bush on which the mother of poor Mungo 
hanged herself. All these touching circumstances are, 
it is said, matters of tradition or of certainty ; and had 
they not existed, the poet would have supplied their place 
with something of the like spirit to stimulate Tam, and 
prepare us for the infernal jubilee. 

Of Tam o' Shanter there are few copies existing in the 
handwriting of Burns : the only one which contains 
variations is in the library of Abbotsford. A relic so sacred 
was duly esteemed by its great possessor : he loved to 
show it to literary visiters, and point out two additional 
lines which distinguished his copy from all others. I 
shall put them into their place : they will be easily dis- 
covered among their companions, for few who read one 
can fail to have the poem by heart. 

" Care, mad to see a man sae happy, 
E'en drown'd himsel amang the nappy. 
As bees flee hame wi' lades o' treasure, 
The minutes wing'd their way wi' pleasure. 
The cricket raised its cheering cry, 
The kittlen chased its tail in joy. 
Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious, 
O'er a' the ills o' life victorious." 

A poem which Campbell, Wordsworth, and Scott have 
praised, and on which CoojDer has employed his pencil, 
requires no further commendation. It was written on 
Nithside, as a bribe to induce Grose to admit Alloway 



176 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

kirk among his antiquities of Scotland ; he composed it 
in one happy stroll, during a twilight interview with the 
muse, and in such an ecstacy, that the tears were running 
down his cheeks. It bears all the marks of an impas- 
sioned fit, and is the best and most finished of all his 
larger poems. 



THE BRIGS OF AYR. 



' Auld Brig appear'd of ancient Pictish race, 
The very wrinkles Gothic in liis face." 



The water of Ayr, over which these two Brigs afford 
a passage to and from the town, is renowned alike in his- 
tory and tradition; and now since the poetry and the 
birth of Burns have bestowed their halo, it is become as 
celebrated as some rivers whose waters are treble its 
amount. The clear stream itself; the uplands from 
which it descends ; the glens down which it hurries ; the 
level lands over which it glides to the sea, and the villages 
and cottages which thrive on its banks, — are all matters 
for the muse : and Bums, sometimes with a gay, and now 
and then with a solemn hand, has recorded them all. Nor 
has he forgotten the tributary rills and streams which 
swell the Ayr, till it is of a size to admit ships — 

" When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, 
Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil, 
Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, 
Or haunted Gai'pal draws his feeble source." 

Many vicissitudes have happened to the land since 
" The two Maiden Sisters" erected the Auld Brig, during 
the days of Alexander the Third. Scotland, lost by the 
folly of Baliol, was won back by the bravery of Wallace ; 
and, reconquered on the lamentable death of that hero, 
was restored to independence by one equally heroic and 



178 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

more fortunate. It is a rough structure of several arches, 
strong yet, and likely to endure : the statues of the Vir- 
gin Founders are still pointed out by the district antiqua- 
ries on the eastern parapet, but time and a stormy climate 
have been dealing with them : the bridge is high, narrow, 
and inconvenient, and, relieved by the new bridge from 
caxts and coaches, is wholly set aside for foot passengers. 
The New Brig, which, from this kindly interposition, the 
old one ought to have regarded as a friend, stands some 
hundred yards or so further down the river, and is hand- 
some and useful. The quarrel between them, as recorded 
by the poet, was on architectural rather than personal 
grounds, and may be regarded as a rustic interpretation 
of the great controversy between Gothic and Roman 
architecture. 

The Auld Brig was erected in other than a Roman taste, 
and sprang, like our abbeys and cathedrals, from the Go- 
thic : the New Brig, built after the design of the Adams's, 
has, like all which came from their hand, the stamp of 
their uncle, Athenian Stuart, upon it. No wonder, there- 
fore, that the Spirit which presided over the old should 
treat with anger and scorn the Spirit which presided over 
the new. She saw a strange and more polished structure 
arise, embellished with columns and capitals, and resented 
the intrusion, as her old hero Wallace would an invasion 
of the Southron. The scorn was answered with scorn ; 
the Spirit of the new looked with compassion and con- 
tempt on the mouldering images and time-flawed arches 
of the old structure, and the rising indignation soon found 
speech. The poet has conducted the controversy with in- 
different skill : the classic Spirit characterizes with some 
force the architecture of which her rival has the charge ; 
while the Gothic Spirit seeks for defence in the beauty, and 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 179 

the wisdom, and the devotion which for six centuries had 
walked over it, Sharply does the New Brig Spirit say — 

" Fine architecture, trouth I needs must say't o't ! 
The Lord be thanket that we've tint the gate o't ! 
Gaunt, ghastly, ghaist-alluring edifices, 
Hanging with threat'ning jutlike precipices ; 
O'er-arching, mouldy, gloom-inspiring coves, 
Supporting roofs fantastic, stony groves ; 
Windows and doors in nameless sculpture drest, 
With order, symmetry, or taste unblest, 
Forms like some bedlam statuary's dream. 
The crazed creations of misguided whim." 

Instead of defending her architecture on the picturesque 
beauty of its combinations, or its lofty elegance, dim de- 
votional splendor, and the harmony and geometrical 
unity of its various parts, the Spirit of the Old Brig 
exclaims — 

" Ye dainty deacons, and ye douce conveners, 
To whom our moderns are but causey-cleaners ; 
Ye godly councils wha hae blest this town. 
Ye godly brethren of the sacred gown, 
How would your spirits groan in deep vexation, 
To see each melancholy alteration ! 
Nae langer reverend men, their country's glory. 
In plain braid Scots hold forth a plain braid story ; 
.Nae longer thrifty citizens and douce, 
Meet o'er a pint or in the Council House," 

The Genius of the Stream puts an end to a controversy, 
in which the strong is vanquished by the weak ; and the 
poem concludes with a high strain of compliment to the 
Poet's patrons, the Stewarts and the Ballantynes. 



THE HOLY FAIR. 



" My name is Fun, your crony dear, 
The nearest friend ye hae ; 
And this is Superstition here, 
And that's Hypocrisy." 



The scene of this lampoon lies in the kirk-yard of 
Mauchline, in Ayrshire ; and the introductory interview 
between the poet and his inspirer Fun, took place on the 
way which leads to that village from Mossgiel. The 
poem, a sharp one, did some service, though perhaps 
unintentional, to the kirk of Scotland : the sacrament was 
in those days dispensed in the open air, and the license 
in which the laxer members of the community indulged, 
gave it much the appearance of a festival or fair. When 
the more unsettled portion of the hearers imagined that 
the discourse of the preacher was mysterious or dry, 
they would adjourn to the change-house, and drink and 
discuss spiritual things in no very decorous language ; 
while others, like the Kilmarnock lads of the poet's satire, 
would roam about the skirts of the congregation, making 
comments aloud, and ** winking on the lasses." All this, 
and much more, the satire of Burns abated in a moment. 
Congregations are now more polite, if not more pious, 
and the idle and profligate seek other scenes on which to 
exhibit their folly. 

The '" Holy Fair" seems to have been suggested by 
the " Leith Races" of Ferguson, to which the opening 
has too close a resemblance to be accidental. The elder 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 181 

bard, in a morning stroll on Edinburgh street, meets with 
mistress Mirth ; the season of the year, as well as the 
lady's looks, is introduced. 

" In July month, ae bonniemorn, 

When Nature's rokelay green 
"Was spread o'er ilka rig of corn, 

To charm our roving een ; 
Glowrin about I saw a quean, 

The fairest 'neath the lift, 
Her een were o' the sillar sheen, 

Her skin like snawy drift." 

This aerial rigurante upbraids Ferguson for idling in the 
street, when Leith Races offered his satiric muse such 
fine instances of ftm and folly. Who this lady might be 
the poet says he wondered : she told him at once — 

" I dwell amang the cauler springs 

That weet the Land o' Cakes, 
And aften tune my cantie strings 

At bridals and late wakes : 
They ca' me Mirth, I ne'er was ken'd 

To grumble or look sour ; 
But blythe wad be a lift to lend 

Gif ye wad sey my power." 

The Fun of Burns goes farther than the Mirth of Fer- 
guson : not content with desiring him to accompany her 
to the " holy spot," she maliciously points out the sisters 
twin. Superstition and Hypocrisy, as fair objects for ridi- 
cule and satire. The poet hastens to the scene, but dis- 
continues the allegory ; those airy creations subside into 
the sober flesh-and-blood realities of life, and he finds the 
incidents of his poem, without their aid, among the sons 
and daughters of men. 
16 



182 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

The picture is wholly satiric, and is more vivid than 
just : for the poet might have found something grave and 
devout, as in the " Cotter's Saturday Night," in contem- 
plating a scene which is at once solemn and sublime. 
But he regarded it merely as a subject suitable for mirth, 
and for those personal sallies so frequent in his poem of 
the *' Ordination," and which the bitter " New Light" 
controversy had taught him. He refrained from giving 
the names of the characters at length in the Edinburgh 
as well as the Kilmarnock edition of his poems ; but in 
most of the copies presented to his friends, the blanks are 
filled up by his own hand — the chief priests of the old 
and adverse light are held up to derision. The kirk of 
Scotland has still preachers w^hose sermons, like those of 
Russell, incline too much to fire and brimstone ; and 
hearers who become too readily " yill-caup- commentators." 

The lands of Mossgiel, where Burns held this imaginary 
interview, have become for these many years a sort of 
pilgrim ground to strangers. Those, and they are many, 
who visit the land of the poet, love to sit in the little 
chamber where he wrote the " Cotter's Saturday Night," 
or sun'ey the fields w^here he composed the " Daisy" or 
the " Mouse," and held his colloquy with Madam Fun. 
Wordsworth told me that on his late journey through 
Ayrshire, he regarded those fields with reverence ; and 
as he looked on them, conceived that fine sonnet, in which 
he has expressed his admiration of the great Peasant Poet 
of Scotland. 



JAMES GLENCAIRN BURNS. 



" The mother may forget the child 

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee; 
But m remember thee, Glencairn, 
And a' that thou hast done for me." 



The first time I saw James Glencairn Burns, the poet's 
third son, was a day or so after the funeral of his father, 
when, accompanied by his brothers Robert and William, 
he was on his way up the streets of Dumfries to the Town 
School. The black dresses, the lawn weepets on their 
jacket cuffs, their extreme youth, and the desolate look of 
the poor orphans, made an impression too deep to be 
effaced. The next time I saw him, was in my own house, 
in London, when he called accompanied by the Ettrick 
Shepherd. Many years, and most of them stirring ones, 
had intervened ; James had sensed, not unnoticed, in 
India, and returned to see his mother and friends with the 
rank of captain. The East seemed to have made little 
impression upon either constitution or looks : I had heard 
this before, through Sir John Malcolm, who loved him 
because he was a worthy officer, as well as the son of a 
great poet, and had, during his command in India, shown 
that he desired to honor him. I found him pleasing and 
unaffected : with his father's love of song, and his mother's 
skill in singing, and with a touch more of the latter than of 
the former — for I knew them both — in his looks. He 
told me he had been at Abbotsford, where Sir Walter Scott 
treated him with uncommon kindness, and asked him to 



184 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

sing one of his father's songs ; he sung " Of a' airts the 
win' can blaw," which made the eyes of his illustrious 
entertainer moist. Neither did the " boy of Burns" leave 
those halls — so soon to become silent and dark — without 
his meed of song from no undistinguished minstrel. 

Captain Burns was named James Glencairn, for James 
Cunningham, the last Earl but one who bore that title — 
the wisest as he was the worthiest patron of the poet, and 
whose virtues are recorded in a Lament not destined to 
become extinct like the line of its hero. When he began 
to grow up, Sir James Shaw — who should be praised as 
often as named, for this and other noble acts — placed 
him in the school of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb and 
Coleridge got their learning. There he was well grounded 
in knowledge, and distinguished himself, but lost the sight 
of his left eye : — when some sixteen years old or so, he 
obtained a commission in the army of India — a fine outlet 
for many high spirits, who are unable from want of influ- 
ence to obtain that poor boon — leave to toil at home. In 
the East, wherever he went he found his father's fame 
before him. The son of Bums was welcomed by all, and 
by none more than the Marquess of Hastings, whose lady 
was of the North, and allied too to names of whom the 
young soldier's father had sung with his usual tenderness. 
His rise in the army depended on events over which his 
noble patron had no control ; but having distinguished 
himself in the Calcutta College, he was entrusted with the 
discharge of some lucrative duties ; and the first person 
he thought of in this gleam of prosperity, was his mother. 
He wrote to Lord Panmure, who had settled an annual 
fifty pounds on the family, e;^pressing his gi'atitude, but 
begging that the pension might be withdrawn ; and to his 
mother he wrote also, telling her what he had done, and 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 185 

making it <£150. It would be unjust not to say that the 
exemplary prudence of his mother preserved the family 
from distress, such as it was suffering at the death of his 
father : and that his maternal uncle, Robert Armour, 
watched — and still watches — anxiously over the varying 
fortunes of all the family. 

Captain Burns, after staying some years here, and 
experiencing much kindness from all classes, returned to 
India, but not to resume those situations which had enabled 
him to spread abundance around his paternal fireside. 
Other rulers held the reins in the empire of the East. 
Sir Walter Scott told me that he had written to high 
quarters in his behalf, but those to whom he applied seem 
not to have had the power; and the poet's son was 
neglected: — he was neglected, but not forgotten — 
brighter and better days were at hand — not those of Lord 
William Bentinck, to whom it is likely that the name of 
Burns was new — but those of Lord Auckland, who, in 
his administration of the East, has called to his aid talent 
of all kinds, and restored hope and confidence both in 
Hindostan and at home. Captain Burns, who returned 
to Bengal in doubt, was soon relieved from his fears : an 
appointment of profit and honor awaited him, and I hear 
he will soon come back and settle with his wife — a most 
worthy lady — in his native soil, and it is to be hoped in the 
Land of Burns. Of his elder brothers, Robert resides in 
the house where his father died in Dumfries, and enjoys 
a small retiring pension from the stamp office, and 
William is a major in the Indian service at Madras. 



16* 



HIGHLAND MARY. 



For dear to me as light and life, 
Was my sweet Highland Mary." 



It is tlie privilege of genius to confer iminortality on 
things mortal, and give to beauty a fame which can die 
only with the language in which that fame is bestowed. 
All the true songs of our nation have been written from 
the heart, and addressed not to creatures of fancy, but to 
beings of flesh and blood — warm and real. This is 
known to the world, who have shown at all times a lively 
curiosity to learn the history of those who have given life 
to poetry, and to whose charms we are indebted for the 
finest productions of the muse. Who would be unwil- 
ling to hear the story of the Rosalind of Spenser, the 
Sacharissa of Waller, or the Highland Mary of Robert 
Burns ? 

Mary Campbell, for such is the name of the most 
famous of the heroines of northern song, was a mariner's 
daughter, a native of Ardrossan, in Ayrshire ; and lived, 
when she won the heart of the poet, in the humble situa- 
tion of Dairy-maid in the " Castle of Montgomery." All 
who have written of her, have spoken of her beauty, the 
swarm of admirers which her loveliness brought, and the 
warmth yet innocence of her affection for the poet of her 
native hills. A single song is all that the prolific muse 
of Burns addressed to her before " hungry ruin had him in 
the wind ;" and he was about to quit the banks of the Ayr, 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 187 

of the Irvine, and of the Doon, for the burning shores of 
the West Indies. It was then that he addressed to her 
the farewell song : — O 

" Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, 
And leave auld Scotia's shore ? 
Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, 
Across th' Atlantic's I'oar 1" 

And it would seem that she had accepted the poet as 
her husband, and was preparing to depart for the land of 
the lime and the orange, when the hand of death was 
upon her. But all this has "been told by the poet himself. 
" After a pretty long trial," says Burns, " of the most 
ardent reciprocal aifection, we met, by appointment, on 
the second Sunday of May, in a sequestered spot on the 
banks of the Ayr, where we spent a day in taking a fare- 
well, before she should embark for the West Highlands, 
to arrange matters among her friends for our projected 
change of life. At the close of the autumn following, she 
crossed the sea to meet me at Greenock, where she had 
scarce landed when she was seized with a malignant 
fever, which hurried my dear girl to her grave in a few 
days, before I could even learn of her illness." The poet 
has pictured those touching moments in verse. 

" How sweetly bloom'd the gay green birk, 

How rich the hawthorn's blossom, 
As underneath their fragrant shade, ] 

I clasp'd her to my bosom ! 
The golden hours, on angel wings, 

Flew o'er me and m.y dearie; 
For dear to me, as light and life, 

Was my sweet Highland Mary." 

Another hand has added to the picture. " This adieu 
was performed," says Cromek, ** in a striking and moving 



iSS THE LAND OF BURNS. 

way ; the lovers stood on each side of a small brook, 
they laid their hands in the stream, and holding a Bible 
between them, pronounced their vows to be faithful to 
each other. They parted never to meet again." The 
spot where this farewell took place is still pointed out. 

The Bible on which they plighted their faith was long 
in the possession of the sister of Mary Campbell. On 
the first volume is written by the hand of Burns : " And 
ye shall not swear by my name falsely ; I am the Lord. 
— Leviticus, chap. xix. ver. 12." On the second volume, 
the same hand has written : " Thou shalt not forswear 
thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths. — 
St. Matthew, chap, v. ver. 33." And on the blank leaves 
of both volumes is impressed his mark as a mason, and 
also signed below, " Robert Burns, Mossgiel." 

Burns's affection for the early object of his love died 
only with him. More than three years after the death of 
Mary Campbell, " whose bosom," to use his o^vn language, 
" was fraught with truth, honor, constancy, and love," he 
wrote one of the most exquisite of his poems — the address 
" To Mary in Heaven." Sweetly and well has Campbell 
sung in his Ode to the Memory of Burns : — 

"Who that has melted o'er his lay, 
To Mary's soul in Heaven above, 
But pictur'd sees, in fancy strong, 

The landscajie and the live-long day, 
That smil'd upon their mutual love '? 
Who that has felt, forgets the song?" 

The nephew of Highland Mary, by name William 
Anderson, is the present possessor of the Bible of Burns, 
which, with a tress of her hair, very long, and very light 
and shining, he preserves and values. 



DEATH AND DOCTOR HORNBOOK. 



" Ye ken Jock Hornbook i' the clachan 
Deil mak his king's-hood in a spleuchan. 



The popular and happy satire of Death and Doctor 
Hornbook is at once very personal and very poetic. The 
hero of the tale is of the West of Scotland, and the scene 
of the strange colloquy lies in the same land. It some- 
times happens that men, when they least look for it, attain 
an eminence from which it is not easy to descend, while 
it is equally unpleasant to remain. Something of this 
kind happened to worthy Dominie Wilson — the Doctor 
HQrnbook of the poem. He was schoolmaster of Tar- 
bolton, Burns himself says, in a note accompanying a 
copy of his poems to Dr. Geddes ; and having some 
scholarcraft and a little vanity, set up as an apothecary, 
and promised advice to the poor, gratis. Burns, who had 
no ^vish to be physicked but by a regular practitioner, 
resented the presumption of the schoolmaster, and it is 
said, meeting him in the mason lodge of Tarbolton, sat 
regarding him — while he descanted on his own know- 
ledge, in language stiffened with pedantry — with flashing 
eyes which witnessed his scorn and contempt. The poet's 
patience failed him at length, and he exclaimed, " Have 
done. Dr. Hornbook ! have done. Dr. Hornbook !" The 
command was disregarded, and Burns sat brooding, it is 
supposed, over his future lampoon, till the hour of separa- 
tion, which happened to be a late one. At those meet- 



190 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

ings of the brethren, drink mingled largely with the 
** mystic word and grip ;" and Cromek, a curious inquirer, 
was told on the spot in 1806, that the poet, who " was na 
fou, but just had plenty," walked slowly homeward, com- 
posing the poem as he went. He became weary, and 
sitting carelessly down to rest and think, fell asleep, but 
when awoke by the morning sun, he found his seat was 
the parapet of a bridge. He went home, committed 
Death and Dr. Hornbook to paper, and went to bed. 
Such is the tradition ; but though tradition too often 
desires to do wonderful things in as wondrous a way, 
some of these circumstances were confided next day to 
his brother Gilbert, when he repeated the poem. " I 
was holding the plough," he adds, " and Robert was letting 
the water off the field beside me." 

That Burns had written this, the most poetic of his 
lampoons, was soon known, for he made no secret of his 
studies; but as he did not print it in the first edition of his 
poems, it is likely that for a time he reckoned it too per- 
sonal. This belief, if indeed he ever entertained it, went 
off in the air of Edinburgh, for it appeared in the second 
edition of his works. One of his best productions, " The 
Jolly Beggars ;" and one of his worst, " The Holy Tul- 
zie," were excluded while he lived, from print. 

The lampoon of Death and Doctor Hornbook was a 
2)unishment too severe for the offence. Wilson, a scholar, 
a good teacher, and a little vain of his acquirements, soon 
found that Burns had thrust him too much into sunshine ; 
and quitting Tarbolton, removed to Glasgow, where he 
engaged in commercial pursuits, and forgot, or seemed to 
forget, that bad eminence on which his brother of the mys- 
tic level had placed him. " At Glasgow," says Cromek 
in 1806, " I heard that the hero of this exqusite satire 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 191 

was living. Hamilton managed to introduce me to him. 
We talked of all subjects save the poems of Burns. He 
is above the middle size ; stout made, and inclining to 
corpulency ; his complexion is swarthy, his eye black and 
expressive : he wears a brown wig, and dresses in black : 
there is little or nothing of the pedant about him." Mr. 
Wilson is living, and enjoying the world ; but his friends, 
I hear, share in the dread felt by Cromek, of alluding 
to the poems of Burns in his presence. 

This poem has an admirer in one of our first-rate poets. 
Wordsworth, who seems to have the poetry of Burns by 
heart, says, " When the poet wrote his ' Death and Doctor 
Hornbook,' he had very rarely been intoxicated, or per- 
haps much exhilarated by liquor ; yet how happily does 
he lead his reader into that track of sensation ! and with 
what lively humor does he describe the disorder of his 
senses and the confusion of his understanding, put to the 
test by his deliberate attempt to count the horns of the 
moon : 

' But whether she had three or four, 
He could na' tell.' 

Behold a sudden apparition, which disperses this disorder, 
and in a moment chills him into possession of himself. 
Coming upon no more important mission than the grisly 
phantom \tas charged with, what mode of introduction 
could have been more efficient or appropriate]" No 
spirit ever came into this world's air more naturally ; yet 
the devil, in the tale of Ramsay, who wore shoes on his 
hoofs, and a bonnet on his horns, is not half so ludicrous, 
though painted on purpose. 



THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT. 



' Tlie cheerfu' supper done, Avi' serious face 

They round the ingle form a circle wide ; 
The sire turns o'er with patriarchal grace 

The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride : 
His bonnet reverently is laid aside, 

His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare ; 
Tliose strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, 

He wales a portion with judicious care ; 
And, ' Let us worship God,' he says, with solemn air." 



The domestic devotion of Scotland has inspired many 
poems and pictures, but no one has touched the subject 
with the solemn feeling and serene beauty of Bums. 
Nor IS his strain confined to religion alone : he felt that 
the sublime act of reading the Gospel and worshipping 
God in prayer made but a jDortion of the scene. He has 
introduced release from toil — a father's affection — a 
mother's care — fire-side happiness — national spirit and 
true and innocent love — as subordinate matters indeed, 
but all conducive to devotion. I have often joined in 
family worship in the cottages of Scotland, and to me it 
was as impressive as the most fervent prayer or the most 
eloquent sermon in a public place. To see a venerable 
man laying his ancestor's Bible across his knees, and with 
all his children and servants around him singing a psalm 
and reading a chapter — while in the former, the softer 
tones of woman's voice mingled with the rougher melody 
of the voice of man; and in the latter, a light from a 
rustic candelabra in the middle of the floor showino^ the 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 193 

reader's gray hair, and the ancient page soiled by long 
and frequent use, — formed, with the grave looks of the 
household, a picture too impressive to be soon forgotten. 
But this was much increased when, closing the Bible, the 
master of the house extinguished the lamp, and saying, 
" Let us pray," all knelt silently down separately at their 
individual seats :. stooping their foreheads nigh the floor, 
and uniting in thought with the prayer now poured pious- 
ly out for their welfare here and hereafter. On these 
occasions I have sometimes ventured to look up to see the 
beauty of the scene around : the moon at the window, or 
the glimmering peat-fire on the floor, helped me to a dim 
view of the fervent old man, his equally fervent dame, or 
a daughter or a maid-servant with her face buried in her 
hands, and her long hair streaming down to the floor. 

This, and more than this, was present to the mind of 
Burns when he composed this noble poem ; and equally 
so to the mind of Wilkie when in his picture he gave to 
the words of the poet the finest shape and the truest color. 
Gilbert Burns has recorded the delight which he felt, 
when in one of their solitary walks Robert first communi- 
cated to him " The Cotter's Saturday Night;" and Mrs. 
Dunlop often related the influence it exercised over her 
when laid on a bed of sickness. The poet wrote it in a 
little chamber or crypt in the farm-house of Mossgiel ; 
and Allan, aware of this when he conceived his picture 
of Burns writing " The Cotter's Saturday Night," gave 
locality to the scene. Another poet, but a far inferior 
one, has given us the impression which the words ''Let 
us pray" made on his mind. 

" ' Now let us pray,' he said. Knelt every knee, 
And down into the dust stooped every face ; 
All lights were quench'd, save that which seraphs see 
17 



194 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

At night, hung o'er the angels' dwelling-place. 
All humbly now before the throne of grace 
He pour'd his spirit forth, and there was given 

Much rapture to him for a little space ; — 
Thought flash'd on thought, as bright and fast as levin ; 
Something there was of earth, but there was more of heaven." 

It sometimes happens that things humorous mingle with 
things serious : one of these incidents illustrates both the 
poem and the manners of the land. Into a blacksmith's 
household, in the vale of Nith, a knowledge, it seems, of 
the bass in music had failed to penetrate, till his eldest 
son brought it from a singing-school, and surprised his 
father when he " took the book," by uniting it to the tenor 
in the tune of The Bangor. The old man at first thought 
that his son had mistaken the tune, and would take up the 
right one when he came to the next verse ; but the other 
struck more boldly into the second verse than he had done 
into the first ; and his father imagining that he was setting 
up an opposition tune, could not keep his wrath from 
rising. The mother, who knew that her husband, a 
worker in fire, was hot and choleric, interposed, and 
turning to her son, said, "O Robin, my man, fye, 
fye ! — taking the word of God out of your poor auld 
father's mouth in that way !" " Never mind him, Janet, 
just never mind him," said old Robin, " I'll break his 
voice till him." So saying, he turned the leaf; and 
choosing the hundred and nineteenth psalm, the longest in 
the book, fairly sung it out and out ; and by the time the 
sun rose, young Robin's voice was so sobered down, that 
his mother afterwards, in telling the story, declared that 
" the scraich of a magpie was music till't." 



THE COUiNTRY LASSIE. 



" In simmer, when the hay was mawn, 

And corn wav'd green hi ilka field, 
While claver blooms white o'er the lea, 

And roses blaw in ilka bield : 
Blithe Bessie in the milking shiel, 

Says — I'll be wed come o't what will 
Out spak a dame in wrinkled eild — 

O' guid advisement comes nae ill." 



The " Country Lassie" is a picture of innocent love, 
and suspicious wisdom : of young love supported by con- 
scious truth and purity, and of ancient wisdom, sustained 
by proverb lore, and the experience of ages. The young'- 
maiden vindicates faith and love ; and without the aid of 
either levity or wit, achieves a victory over her wily 
opponent. The dame of wrinkled eld, seems to belong 
to the household of Mammon : she makes -out a good 
case in favor of what she considers a prudent match, 
and thinks, with the old adage, " When poverty comes 
in at the door, love flies out at the window ;" and that 
gold and bonds are superior to health, and strength, and 
youth : she is full of wise saws and modern instances. 

" O, thoughtless lassie, life's a faught! 
The canniest gate, the strife is sair: 
But ayfu' han't is fetchin best, 

A hungry care's an unco care : 
But some will spend, and some will spare, 

An' wilfu' folk maun hae their will : 
Syne as ye brew my maiden fair, 

Keep mind that ye maun drink the yill." 



196 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

The " Maiden fair" smiles at all this array of rhyming 
wisdom, and in the sentiments she utters, shows that she 
has not made her choice without thought and consideration. 
See how she scatters like chaff the armed ranks which 
" wrinkled eld" and gray suspicion mustered to make war 
on true and faithful love. 

"O, gear will buy me rigs o' land, 

And gear will buy me sheep and kye ; 
But the tender heart o' leesomc luve 

The gowd and siller canna buy. 
We may be poor, my love and I, 

Light is the burden luve lays on : 
Content and luve bring peace and joy — 

What mair hae queens upon a throne 1" 

This fine song was written on the banks of Nith, at 
Ellisland, in the summer of 1790 ; and any one who will 
stand on the scaur on the south side of the stream, and 
look on the fine holms of Dalswinton, may enjoy the scene 
which the poet had before him when he composed it. The 
sentiments of the song, and the images of love which it 
calls up, will then be viewed inclosed in a frame-work of 
great beauty, and in perfect keeping with the poetry ; 
and it is in this way that many of his songs must be exa- 
mined, to feel their force and beauty. 

Burns thought so well of the " Country Lassie," that 
when he composed it, he sent it to his friend, John 
M'Murdo, of Drumlanrig, with the following letter ; — "A 
poet and a beggar are in so many points of view alike, 
that one might take them for the same individual charac- 
ter under different designations, were it not that, though, 
with a trifling license, most poets may be styled beggars, 
yet the converse of the proposition does not hold that every 
beggar is a poet. In one particular, however, they re- 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 197 

markably agree : if you help either the one or the other 
to the picking of a bone, or a mug of ale, they will very 
willingly repay you wdth verse. I feel myself indebted 
to you, in the style of our ballad-printers, for * five excel- 
lent new songs.' The enclosed is nearly my newest song, 
' The Country Lass ;' and one that has cost me some 
pains, though that is but an equivocal mark of excel- 
lence. With the compliments and best wishes, I send 
the sincere prayers of the season for you, that you may 
see many and happy years with Mrs. M'Murdo, and your 
family — two blessings, by-the-bye, to which your rank 
does not by any means entitle you ; a loving wife, and a 
fine family, being almost the only good things of this life 
to which the farm-house has an exclusive right." 

That the song cost Burns, as he observes, pains, I have 
seen proofs, in his own handwriting : of the two originals 
submitted to my examination, both exhibited variations of 
sentiment and language, not only from each other, but 
from the song as it stands in print. The most important 
of these occurred in the last four lines of the third verse, 
and are worth preserving. 

" But Robie's heart is frank and free, 
Fu' weel I wat he loes me dearj 
And love blinks bonnie in his ee, 
For love I'll wed, and work for gear.'* 

I cannot help regarding these four lines as more in 
keeping with the sentiment of the song than those which 
the poet finally preferred : it is likely that, in working his 
own name into the strain, he glanced as he wrote at the 
circumstances of his own story. 



17* 



DUNCAN GRAY. 



" Maggie coost her head fu' heigh. 
Looked asklent and unco' skeigh, 
Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh, 

Ha ! ha ! the wooing o'U" 



This lively song was written in Dumfries, on the 4th 
day of December, 1792 ; and the poet thus speaks of it to 
George Thomson, for whose work it was composed : — 
" The foregoing I submit, my dear sir, to your better 
judgment. Duncan Gray is that kind of light horse-gal- 
lop of an air which precludes sentiment. The ludicrous 
is its ruling feature." In his answer Thomson says, 
*' Duncan is indeed a lad of grace, and his humor will 
endear him to every body ;" to which the Hon. Andrew 
Erskine, Thomson's partner in the Melodies, adds, " Dun- 
can Gray possesses native genuine humor, — 

* Spak o' lowpin owre a linn,' 

is a line, of itself, which should make you immortal." 
The opinions of these writers have been sanctioned by 
the world, and Duncan Gray finds a place in all collections 
where merit is the rule of selection. 

It had its origin, however, like many of our finest 
lyric strains, in verses of the same name and of a similar 
character, but wilder and coarser in every way, where 
the hero has no right to be called a lad of grace, for he 
is outspoken and unceremonious. The air has a plebeian 
origin, and the words have what shepherds call a touch 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 199 

of the taiTed finger. The former was composed, as Burns 
himself tells us, by a carman of Glasgow ; who wrote the 
earliest words it is needless now to inquire, since they 
have been silenced for ever by the strains of the Bard of 
Ayr. The Duncan Gray which appeared in " Johnson's 
Musical Museum," from the hand of Burns, is in every 
way purer and better. It begins — 

" Weary fa' ye, Duncan Gray," 

and was, while the poet lived in Dumfries, a favorite on 
Nithside ; the second verse has humor and poetry ; and 
contains both commendation and complaint : — 

" Bonnie was the Lammas morn ; 

Ha ! ha ! the girdin o't ! 
Glowrin a' the hills aboon ; 

Ha ! ha ! the girdin o't ! 
The gu-den brak, the beast cam down, 
I tint my curch and baith my shoon — 
Ah, Duncan ye're an unco loon, 

Wae on the bad girden o't." 

Painters have often tried to embody the action and the 
humor of the third and best version of " Duncan Gray ;" 
and Wilkie, of all others, has come nearest it ; but the 
story of the poet runs on, linking word with word, 
incident with incident, and connecting the past with the 
present ; while the group of the painter, like the finger 
of a clock, points but to one moment of time, and thus 
those who expect to find all that Burns has related repre- 
sented in the picture, are disapjDointed : they should con- 
sider that aVt stands still like a canal, while poetry runs on- 
ward like a stream. Yet there is much in the verse on 
which the pencil of the painter will delight to dwell, and 
he is at liberty too to imagine subsidiary matters to help 



200 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

liim with the ruling sentiment. This will explain why the 
father and mother, personages unknown to the verse, are 
introduced in the picture, and the mother's whisper 
and the father's look influence their not reluctant daughter. 
Burns accomplishes the conversion of Maggie from dis- 
dain to love by one of those revulsions of feeling so 
common to the female heart, and allows affection to do 
its duty without aid or assistance. 

I remember when I first saw the picture of " Duncan 
Gray," a little story of rustic courtship arose to my 
memory, which I related to the great painter: — Imme- 
diately below Ellisland, where Burns, w^hen I first saw 
him, lived, there is a farm called the Isle, in which stands 
a small gray old tower, once a place of defence and the 
residence of a gentleman ; but in the days of which I 
speak the dwelling-place of a farmer, who had one fair 
daughter, whose eyes brought suitors from both sides of 
the river. It happened one evening that a lover arrived 
— a man wealthy and well put on — whose outward 
estate caught the fancy of father and mother, but who 
failed in making himself at all acceptable to the daughter ; 
who was in the very act of saying *' Nay," when her father 
whispered, " Take him, Jenny, take him ! he's weel 
arrayed; he has twa tap coats and a plaid on !" The 
goodly apparel carried the day in the vale of Nith, as it 
carries it in the vale of Thames and on the pavement of 
Bond street. 



MRS. BURNS. 



' There's not a bonny flower that springs 
By fountain, shaw, or green, — 
There'snot a bonny bird that sings, 
But minds me o' my Jean." 



When Bishop Percy lamented that there were few 
songs in our language expressing the joys of wedded 
love, Burns was a lad some two-and-twenty years old ; 
but though his life was brief, he lived long enough to 
hinder Percy's remark from continuing proverbial, and 
gladdened our firesides with strains dedicated to house- 
hold love, which live in every heart, and are heard from 
every tongue. 

Few of our poets have been happy in their wives : 
Shakspeare neglected his, and all but forgot her in his 
will ; Milton, though more than once married, was unable 
to find that domestic quiet which, perhaps, his own nature 
prevented him from obtaining ; the poems of Dryden 
bear witness to the imhappiness of his choice, for the 
sharpness of his satire has an additional edge when a 
fling can be had at matrimony ; and Addison sought the 
comfort abroad, which his wife, the Dowager Countess 
of Warwick, denied him at home. To this the wife of 
Burns, the "bonnie Jean" of many a far-famed song, was 
an exception; she was a country girl of the west of Scot- 
land, remarkable for the elegance of her person and the 
sweetness of her voice. Her father was a respectable 
master-mason in Mauchline,in good employment, and with 



202 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

a family of eleven children. Jean was born in February 
1765, and was, when Bunis became intimate with her 
but newly out of her teens. How her -acquaintance with 
the poet began, she loved to relate : — she had laid some 
linen webs down on the grass to bleach, and while - 
sprinkling them with water from the neighboring burn, a 
favorite collie of the poet's ran across them, staining them 
with its feet, to fawn upon her ; she struck at the dog, 
when Burns stepped forward, and reproached her in the 
words of Allan Ramsay : — 

" E'en as he fawned, she strak the poor dumb tyke." 

The fair bleacher smiled, and an acquaintance commenced, 
which a country place like Mauchline afforded many 
opportunities to promote. 

This ripened into love ; she was united to Burns, and 
during his too short life, bore to him four sons and five 
daughters, three of whom, and these all men, sun'ive- 
She was a kind and dutiful wife, an affectionate mother, 
and a good neighbor. All who knew her liked her ; and 
though country bred, and with moderate education, she 
was not wanting in conversation fit for the most accom- 
plished, and left an impression of her good sense on the 
many strangers who, like pilgrims to a shrine, went to see 
her for the sake of the Bard. It should be added, that 
she danced with grace and neatness, and sang, moreover, 
Scottish songs, with a spirit, a feeling, and a sweetness, 
but seldom found together. " She has," says Bums to 
Miss Chalmers, '* the finest wood-note-wild I ever heard." 

The two best songs which her charms called forth are 
those beginning — 

" Of a' the airts the win' can blaw," 
and — 

" O were I on Parnassus' hill." 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 203 

The former was written, as he himself tells us, during the 
honey-moon : and what a glorious welcome to his new 
farm does the latter contain ! Had he welcomed her to 
Hagley or to Stowe, the strain could not have come more 
freely from the heart, or had more of passion or of poetry 
about it. One of these alone had been enough to have 
embalmed the name of a mistress tin song; but the two 
together have immortalized a wife. 

But there are other songs, excellent of their kind, and 
only inferior in beauty because they cannot abide com- 
parison with things perfect, that record the beauty of Jean 
Armour. How exquisite is this brief strain — the finest 
essences are held in the smallest bottles : — 

'* Louis, what reck I by thee, 
Or Geordie on his ocean 1 
Dy vor, beggar-loons to me — 
I reign in Jeanie's bosom. 

'* Let her crown my love her law, 
And in her breast enthrone me ; 
Kings and nations — swith, awa! 
Reif randies, I disown ye!" 

Jean Armour, whose name has no chance of passing 
from the earth, died on Wednesday, the 26th of March, 
1834, and was buried by the side of her husband, whom 
she had survived nearly eight-and-thirty years. 



BURNS AND GAVIN HAMILTON AT 
NANSE TINNOCK'S. 



Tell yon guid biuid o' auld Boconnock's 
I'll be his debt twa mashlum bonnocks, 
And drink his health in auld Nanse Tinnock's , 
Nine times a week." 



In a note on the above verse, Burns says, *'A worthy old 
hostess of the author's in Mauchhne, where he sometimes 
studies pohtics over a glass of guid auld Scotch drink." 
When honest Nanse heard these lines for the first time, it 
is said she exclaimed, " Nine times a week ! Oh ! sirs, 
how these rhymers are gi'en to lying : and ' studies poli- 
tics owre a glass of Scotch drink ! ' a hen-bird might 
drink a' at a draught he ever drank in my house. I 
never saw the color o' his coin." Nanse Tinnock was 
the Meg Dods of Mauchline ; and while she brewed good 
ale for all and sundry, she was discreet and cautious in 
whatever regarded her customers. When some fretful 
wife came seeking her husband, Nanse generally eluded 
all direct response to the inquiry by saying, '* He seldom 
darkens my doors ; but if ye misdoubt my word, gang in, 
and if ye find your joe, ye'll have a brighter een than 
mine." At other times a tarter reply was needful — 
** Have I yere goodman in my pouch, think ye, that I can 
produce him when he's wanted V Yet she occasionally 
took upon her the part of those who with a soft answer 
seek to turn away wrath, and was, moreover, a kind host- 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 205 

ess to all comers : those who sought ale, got bread and 
cheese also. The bread consisted of the *' knuckled cakes 
weel brandered brown," of the old Scottish song : and as 
Nanse set them on the board, she would say, " Foul fa' 
them that ever separate the blood of barley from the 
heart of corn." Her house, like herself, was kept clean 
and neat ; she admitted no strolling mendicants, such as 
harbored at Poosy Nansie's, and toomed their bags and 
pawned their rags, and yet left their thirst unquenched. 
Her house stands in the way by which the poet came to 
Mauchline from Mossgiel : it is of two stories, and was 
built in the year 1744. 

Of Nanse we have said perhaps enough : and of Gavin 
Hamilton, the jDoet has told, that he was a social and 
witty and friendly gentleman, who loved to puzzle the 
too puritanic clergy of the district by his learning and his 
acuteness, and incense them by the neglect of ordinances 
and ceremonies, which they considered as essential to 
salvation. To the latter part of their complaint, the poet 
has neatly alluded in some lines omitted in the " Dedica- 
tion." 

" He sometimes gallops on a Sunday, 
And pricks the beast as if 'twere Monday." 

Hamilton was of the family of Kype, in Lanarkshire, 
and a lawyer of good practice and character. The house 
in which he lived when Burns was his visiter, formed 
part of a place of strength connected with the Priory of 
Mauchline, and is now inhabited by one of his sons. At 
his table the poet was a welcome guest ; and it was 
there, on his return from church, that he repeated, before 
he wrote down, the sarcastic poem of " The Calf" In after 
days, when Fame, as he said, blew her trumpet at his 
18 



206 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

approach, he saw Charlotte Hamilton, his friend's sister, 
on the banks of the Devon ; and struck with her beauty, 
bestowed those attentions and offered that homage which 
writers have not scrupled to call — love. But the reputa- 
tion of the poet in love-matters, it is like, had gone before 
him, and hindered his merits from having their proper 
influence over a proud bosom : be that as it may, the 
hand he had hoped for, poetically at least, was bestowed 
on another, and Burns had to recall his thoughts from 
Devon to Doon. It happened that in the room where the 
poet repeated " The Calf," he received the hand of Jean 
Armour, whose father's house was close at hand. 

The persecution which Hamilton suffered at the hands 
of his parish minister, the Daddy Auld of the satires of 
Bums, looks strange now, even in Scottish eyes. He was 
accused of wilful absence from church for five Sundays 
running — of journeying to Carrick on the Sabbath — of 
habitual neglect of family worship — and of writing a 
satiric letter to the kirk session, on account of their pro- 
ceedings against him. Wilful absence from church, 
ostentatious journeyings on the sabbath, and neglect of 
family worship, are still regarded in the North as matters 
not, at least, to be commended. But few clergymen 
now would think it either charitable or wise to use the 
thunder of the church in crushing errors which are ever 
amenable to kindly persuasion, and mild admonition. The 
clergy north, indeed, as well as south, ought to feel more 
alarm lest some infidel-hand should rudely pull down the 
whole christian fabric, than for the sharpest lampoons that 
satire can pen, or for persisting in such eiTors as Hamilton 
was accused of. The kirk of Scotland did not sympathize 
with the minister of Mauchline ; the presbytery caused 
the proceedings to be stopped, and all entries of them 



THE LAND OP BURNS. 207 

removed from the records. The house of Kype claims a 
high pedigree : on a visit of the laird to Hamilton Palace, 
the Duke haughtily asked, " In w^hat part of the tree of 
my Hamiltons is the house of Kype to be found 1" " Ye 
cannot find the root among the branches," said the ances- 
tor of Gavin proudly ; and his retort became proverbial. 



WILLIE BREWED A PECK O' MAUT. 



' Willie brewed a peck o' maut, 

And Rob and Allan came to see ; 
Thiee blither hearts the lee-lang night, 

Ye wadna find in Christendie. 
We are na fou, we're no that fou, 

But just a drappie in our e'e : 
The cock may craw, the day may daw. 

And ay we'll taste the barley bree." 



This is one of the Ellisland songs, and ranks with the 
best of the compositions of Burns in buoyancy and humor; 
nor is the scene unreal, or the persons whom it celebrates 
imaginary. When the poet took to the plough at Ellis- 
land, and found but few joyous spirits in the vale of Nith, 
he desiredto have at least one sure and social friend near ; 
and as the little estate of Laggan was for sale, and lay at 
no great distance from his own door, he persuaded Wil- 
liam Nicol, one of the masters of the High-school of 
Edinburgh, to purchase it, and so become his neighbor 
during vacation time. Among other improvements, the 
new proprietor built a house : and to have it " heated" 
rightly, he invited Burns from Ellisland, and Allan Mas- 
lerton, the musician, from Dalswinton, and promised 
them the best of liquor and the warmest of welcomes. 
The poet and his friend accordingly waited on the "illus- 
trious lord of Laggan's many hills ;" the meeting was 
friendly and joyous, and extended, so the tradition of the 
land asserts, from the going down to the rising of the sun. 
The punch was made, it is said, in the poet's bowl, by the 
experienced hand of Nicol, who was a jovial person, and, 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 209 

as well as Masterton, no flincher at a carousal ; the two 
guests were so pleased, that they resolved, each in their 
own way, to celebrate the business : and the fine air, and 
still finer song, of" Willie brewed a peck o' maut," was 
the consequence. 

The three heroes of this celebrated lyric died all early 
in life ; they fell more through the strength of their pas- 
sions, it is said, than from fair natural decay. Burns went 
first; Nicol followed; nor did Masterton remain long 
behind. " They were all under the turf," says Currie, 
" in 1799." Several of the songs of Burns were furnished 
with airs by Allan : those who are curious to learn with 
what skill this was done, may be satisfied by looking into 
that equally valuable and curious work, " Johnson's 
Musical Museum." The musician enjoyed life too keenly 
to last long ; but his airs will endure, and the memory of 
his name will live, in the *' Willie brewed a peck o' maut" 
and " Strathallan's Lament" of his friend, and the beauty 
of his daughter, in the song, dedicated by Burns to her 
agreeable manners and good looks, beginning with — 

" Ye gallants bright, I rede ye right 

Beware o' bonnie Ann ; 
Her comely face sae fou o' grace, 

Your heart she will trepan. 
Youth, grace, and love, attendant move, 

And pleasure leads the van ; 
In a' their charms and conquering arms, 

They wait on bonnie Ann." 

The name of Nicol has no such airs as those of " Stra- 
thallan's Lament," or " Willie brewed a peck o' maut," 
to preserve it from forgetfulness : he is chiefly remem- 
bered as a fierce disputatious pedant, who loved drink 
and contradiction, and desired to take and keep the lead 
18* 



210 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

in conversation. To his pride Burns made some serious 
sacrifices during one of his Highland excursions. On 
reaching Fochabers, the poet went to renew his acquaint- 
ance with the gay Duchess of Gordon ; and when dinner 
was over, and the wine had begun to circulate, he rose, 
and on being pressed to stay, mentioned that a fellow-tra- 
veller was waiting for him at the inn. The invitation was 
courteously extended to Nicol ; and Burns, accompanied 
by a Gordon, waited on the dominie, and delivered it in 
all the forms of politeness. " The invitation," says 
Currie, *' came too late ; the pride of Nicol was inflamed 
into a high degree of passion by the neglect which he had 
already suffered. He had ordered the horses to be put to 
the carriage, being determined to j)roceed on his journey 
alone ; and they found him parading the streets of Focha- 
bers, before the door of the inn, venting his anger on the 
postillion for the slowness with which he obeyed his 
commands. As no explanation nor entreaty would 
change the purpose of his fellow traveller, our poet was 
reduced to the necessity of separating from him entirely, 
or of instantly proceeding with him on their journey. He 
chose the last of these alternatives ; and, seating him- 
self beside Nicol in the post-chaise, with mortification and 
regret, he turned his back on Gordon Castle, where he 
had promised himself some happy days." How Burns 
came to associate himself with the intractable scholar, we 
may inquire in vain ; it would appear that the poet had 
received a regular invitation to Gordon Castle; that Mr. 
Addington, now Viscount Sidmouth, and Dr. Beattie, 
were invited to meet him, and that the Duke and Duchess 
hoped to help his fortunes by showing him in an advan- 
tageous light to these and other guests ; — but 

" The best laid schemes o' mine and men 
Gang aft agley." 



PEGGY.— NOW WESTLIN WIN'S. 



" Not vernal showers to budding flowers, 
Not autumn to the farmer, 
So dear can be as thou to me. 
My fair, my lovely charmer." 



This is one of the earliest of the Poet's lyrics, and its 
heroine was one of the earliest of his mistresses ; the song 
mingles true love with true landscape, and entwines very 
gracefully the emotions of his youthful heart round the 
beautiful in external nature. Burns felt — for he was a 
farmer — the joy of the season ; and he knew the pleasure 
of a twilight walk with one who shared in his feelings, 
for he was an ardent lover : yet he was less lucky in his 
wooing than in his song. To this person he addressed 
some very sensible and beautiful letters, several of which 
were published, and then withdrawn, by Currie ; and to 
her he dedicated four lyrics, of which the one beginning 
" Now westlin win's" is the best. She was alai-med, it is 
said, when one or two of the poet's epistles to her ap- 
peared in print ; more so at the allusions in his account 
of himself to Moore : nor was it to be wondered at ; for 
the free life which he led, as well as his unceremonious 
language, alarmed the delicacy of many ladies who ad- 
mired his genius. 

It appears that "Montgomery's Peggie," as he calls her 
in one of his songs, was a young woman well educated, 
and of a higher station than himself j she was handsome 



212 THE LAND OP BURNS. 

too, and had the merit of knowing it ; and, pleased with 
the eloquence and with the incense offered her in song, 
she permitted Burns to indulge in his dream of love for 
some six or eight months, and then informed him that she 
had promised her hand to another, at which he was as 
sorrowful as he was exasperated. Perhaps her decision 
was influenced by the darkening fortunes of the farmer ; 
the clouds of misfortune were gathering round his father's 
head, and bankruptcy and death were at hand. " To 
crown my distresses," he says, in his letter to Moore, " a 
hellejille, whom I adored, and who had pledged her soul 
to meet me in the field of matrimony, jilted me with pecu- 
liar circumstances of mortification." These peculiar cir- 
cumstances, of mortification did not however hinder him 
afterwards from wishing her well in a song. 

" Ye powers of honor, love, and truth, 
From every ill defend her ; 
Inspire the highly-favored youth 

The destinies intend her : 
Still fan the sweet connubial flame 

Responsive in each bosom, 
And bless the dear parental name 
With many a filial blossom." 

' These are but cold lines : how different is the rapture of 
the verse dedicated to her beauty, when her refusal was 
unspoken, and hope was high. 

" Ilk cai-e and fear, when thou art near, 

I ever niair defy them ; 
Young kings upon their hansel throne 

Are no sae blest as I am. 
When in my arms, wi' a' thy charms, 

I clasp my countless treasure, 
I seek nae mair, O heaven ! to share, 

Than sic a moment's pleasure." 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 213 

In an equally ardent, but in a more respectful strain, 
Burns celebrates, in the song of " Westlin win's" before 
us, the delight which he experienced when straying with 
his Montgomery's Peggie among the fields of ripening 
grain, or musing on her loveliness in the light of the moon. 

'' Now westlin win's and slaughtering guns 

Bring autumn's pleasant weather ; 
The moorcock springs on whirring wings, 

Among the blooming heather : 
Now waving grain wide o'er the plain 

Delights the weary farmer, 
And the moon shines bright, when I rove at night 

To muse upon my charmer." * 

In sober prose he relates the upshot of his musing and 
his courting. *' My Montgomery's Peggie was my deity for 
six or eight months : she had been bred in a style of life 
rather elegant ; but, as Vaubrugh says, ' My damned star 
found me out there too ;' I began the affair merely in a 
gaietG de ccEur, or to tell the truth, which will scarcely be 
believed — a vanity of showing my parts in courtship — 
particularly my abilities in a billet doux, on which I always 
piqued myself; and when, as I always do in my foolish 
gallantries, I had battered myself into a very warm affec- 
tion for her, she told me, in a flag of truce, that her for- 
tress had been for some time the rightful property of 
another. It cost me some heart-aches to get rid of the 
affair." These light words of the poet seem well suited 
to the character of a lady who could listen to the addresses, 
and saunter beneath the moon, with one man, while she 
was the " rightful property" of another. 



LAMENT FOR JAMES, EARL OF 
GLENCAIRN. 



" The bridegroom may forget the bride 

Was made liis wedded wife yestreen : 
The monarch may forget the crown 

That on liis head an hour has been, 
Tlie mother may forget the child 

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee ; 
But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, 

And a' that thou hast done for me V 



" Surely," says Dryden, when speaking of the little 
patronage which the poetical genius of this country has 
met with, " it is enough for one age to have neglected 
Mr. Cowley, and to have starved Mr. Butler." He might 
have added — to have let Otway die with hunger. For 
our own age, it is a sufficient disgrace that Chatterton and 
Burns were left to die neglected — the one a youth of 
some sixteen, the other of six and thirty ; the one a mere 
boy, the other at an age when the majority of the great 
men of our nation were but opening into blossom, and 
had given but slender promise of what was to come. 

Burns had but one true patron, and death removed 
that one almost as soon as he was found. This was 
James Cunningham, Earl of Glencairn, a nobleman whose 
descent and title were his least recommendations to 
notice, and whose name will live imperishably in the 
works of one whose genius he was among the first to 
perceive, and whose welfare he was the most active and 
eager to promote. 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 215 

At his first visit to Edinburgh, Burns was introduced 
through Dah-ymple, of Orangefield, in Ayrshire, to the 
Earl of Glencairn ; " a man," says the bard, " whose 
worth and brotherly kindness to me I shall remember 
when time shall be no more." By his interest, the noble- 
men and gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, to the 
number of one hundred, took one and all a copy of the 
first Edinburgh edition of his poems, for which they paid 
a guinea each, while the price to the other subscribers 
was but six shillings. The Earl himself, though far from 
rich, took twenty-four. " The baneful star," the poet 
writes to Dr. Moore, " that had so long shed its blasting 
influence in my zenith, for once made a revolution to 
the nadir ; and a kind Providence placed me under the 
patronage of one of the noblest of men, the Earl of 
Glencairn." 

To this generous Earl there are, in the letters of Bums, 
very frequent and gratifying allusions. Invariably is he 
spoken of as the one by whose patronage and goodness 
he had been rescued from obscurity, from wretchedness, 
and from exile ; as his best friend — his first and dearest 
patron and benefactor. " The generous patronage of 
your late illustrious brother," he writes to the last Earl of 
Glencairn, " found me in the lowest obscurity : he intro- 
duced my rustic muse to the partiality of my country, 
and to him I owe all." This is the language of one - 
obliged. " Nor shall my gratitude perish with me !" 
he assures Lady Betty Cunningham. " If among my 
children I shall have a son that has a heart, he shall 
hand it down to his child as a family honor and a family 
debt, that my dearest existence I owe to the noble house 
of Glencairn." 

When the poet was ornamenting his farm-house at 



216 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

Ellisland, he hung the portraits of Dr. Blacklock and the 
Earl of Glencairn over his parlor chimney-piece. Be- 
neath the portrait of Glencairn he had written some 
eulogistic lines, which he submitted to his Lordship's 
approval, and sought his permission to make public. This 
the Earl seems to have refused ; and it has been said that 
the poet, stung by the refusal, destroyed his own copy of 
the verses, as many had sought for them in vain. But 
this is not the case ; the poet's rough copy of them is in 
the keeping of his son. Captain James Glencairn Burns^ 
and with his kind permission they now appear for the 
first time in print. 

LINES INTENDED TO BE WRITTEN UNDER A NOBLE 
EARL'S PICTURE. 

" Whose is that noble, dauntless brow 1 

And whose that eye of fire'? 
And whose that generous princely mien, 

E'en rooted foes admire '? 
Stranger ! to justly show that brow, 

And mark that eye of fire, 
Would take His hand, whose vernal tints 

His other works inspire. 

" Bright as a cloudless summer sun, 

With stately port he moves ; 
His guardian seraph eyes with awe 

The noble ward he loves — 
Among th' illustrious Scottish sons 

That chief thou may'st discern ; 
Mark Scotia's fond i-eturning eye — 

It dwells upon Glencairn." 

The subject of these verses died on the 30th of Janu- 
ary, 1791, at the age of forty-two ; 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 217 

" O why has worth so short a date, 

While villains ripen gray with time 7" 

He was succeeded in the title by his brother, who survived 
him but a short time, and at whose death the title became 
extinct. Burns went into mourning for his noble patron, 
nor was his mourning " the mockery of woe." Where 
there is fiction there is little grief, says Johnson ; but 
surely, in the Lament for Glencaim, there is true fiction 
and there is deep grief 



19 



THE BIRKS OF ABERFELDY. 



" Let fortune's gifts at random flee, 
They ne'er shall draw a wish frae me, 
Supremely blest wi' love and thee, 
In the Birks of Aberfeldy." 



The happy mixture of landscape and love, in the song 
of " The Birks of Aberfeldy," has made it popular with 
all admirers of natural scenery and woman's beauty, and 
rendered the place classic : for visiters from other coun- 
tries than England resort there, when the woods are in 
leaf, and the Falls have lowered their voice, and imagine 
where Burns stood v^hen he conceived the song. ** I 
composed these stanzas," he says in his notes on " The 
Musical Museum," " under the Falls of Aberfeldy, at or 
near Moness ;" and from his first Highland tour, we learn 
that this happened about the beginning of September, 
1787 ; the entry in his memoranda is briefly this, " Aber- 
feldy — described in rhyme." It seems much the pleasure 
of the Scottish poets to work into their strains the 
names of the hills, and vales, and woods, and streams of 
their native land. The two James's, First and Fifth — 
poets of a high order — sang of Peblis to the Play, and 
Christ's Kirk on the Green ; Ramsay made Habbie's 
Howe famous, in what Burns truly calls, " the only 
pastoral of nature in the language." Both Crawfurd and 
Hamilton remembered the Tweed in their songs ; Thom^ 
son rendered his native valley vocal in " The Seasons ;" 
Leyden confen*ed a new interest on Te\dotdale ; Scott 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 219 

hallowed the whole Border, and threw his mantle over the 
Highlands ; Hogg loved, like the fairies, to haunt green 
and lovely places ; and a whole district has been called 
the Land of Burns, because it supplied him with scenes 
and persons for his poems and songs. 

Many of the lyrics of Burns had their origin in curious 
scraps of old verse, with which his memory was well 
stored ; not a few of them were inspired by the sweet- 
ness of some fine scene ; and all of them, more or less, 
were influenced by the charms of some favorite beauty. 
From all these sources the song^ of " The Birks of 
Aberfeldy" appears to have come, for all may be 
traced in it. On passing Tay Bridge the poet made 
his way to the Falls of Aberfeldy ; tradition says, he 
was accompanied by several friends, and among them 
a young lady, whom fame has wronged by neglecting to 
name. The charms of his companion, the beauty of the 
Falls, and the remembrance of an old strain, wrought so 
in him, that unbidden numbers came ; and he composed 
the song, which includes them all, before he quitted the 
spot or the lady left his arm. Such scenes and such cir- 
cumstances always exercised an influence over Burns; 
many of his most exquisite compositions came from him 
by accident, and without study. It was in compliment 
to a chance meeting with Miss Alexander, that he wrote 
" The Lass of Ballochmyle;" a smile from a clergyman's 
daughter, where he happened to dine, produced " The 
Blue-eyed Lass ;" the request of a brother exciseman 
brouo^ht " The Deil came fiddling;' throusrh the town" into 
existence ; and a thunder-shower, like the trumpet-sound, 
gave life to " Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled." This list 
might easily be lengthened. 

Of the old strain which suggested at least the measure 
as well as the chorus of that of Burns, the curious in 



220 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

such matters will find it in our old collections ; the air, 
which is a fine one, is inserted in a book, both old and rare, 
called " Playford's Dancing Master," where it is ascribed 
to Scotland. The name of the original song is " The 
Birks of Abergeldy," and the heroine seems not to have 
been of the trusting nature of the lady who accompanied 
Burns. 

" Bonnie lassie, will ye go, 
Will ye go, will ye go ; 
Bonnie lassie, will ye go 

To the Birks of Abergeldy 1 
An' ye sail get a gown o' silk, 

A gown o' silk, a gown o' silk ; 
Ye sail get a gown o' silk. 
And a coat o' calimance." 

The young lady's mother, as well as the heroine 
herself, seems to have regarded this invitation as insidious ; 
the latter replies : 

"Na,kind sir, I daurna gang, 

I daurna gang, I daurna gang; 
Na, kind sir, I daurna gang. 

My minnie she'll be angry. 
Sair sair wad she flyte, 

Wad she flyte, wad she flyte, 
Sair sair wad she flyte. 

And sair wad she ban me." 

Very few of the heroines of our old lyrics were so 
considerate as the lass of Abergeldy. Those intimate 
with our national poetry cannot but know, that whatever 
may have been the actions of our ancestors, their speech 
in song was, at least, very free and indecorous. The 
world owes much to Burns, for having, as he happily 
expressed it, thrashed the loose sentiments out of our 
early lyrics, and rendered them incapable of raising a 
blush on the cheek of beauty. 



JOHN ANDERSON MY JO. 



* John Anderson my jo, John, 
We clamb the hill thegither ; 

And mony a canty day, John, 
We've had wi' ane aiiither : 

Now we maun totter down, John, 
But hand in hand we'll go. 

And sleep thegither at the foot, 
John Anderson my jo." 



John Anderson my Jo has furnished matter for many 
painters and inspired many poets ; but of all the strains 
of the latter, those of Burns continue unrivalled for liquid 
ease, domestic love, and elegant simplicity. The old 
Scottish bard who first furnished words to the air, threw 
his hand carelessly and roughly over the strings of his 
harp, and sang a strain equally unceremonious and indeli- 
cate. Some versifier of the west of Scotland had the 
hardihood to add his " Paisley harn" to the " Snaw-white 
seventeen hunder linen" of Burns ; whose exquisite 
verses had for several years to cany the ungracious bur- 
den, in spite of the eloquent and indignant remonstrances 
of Currie. Yet in the ancient strain we find something 
like the rudiments of the new. 

" John Anderson my jo, John, 
Come in asye gae by, 
And ye sail get a sheep's-head 

Weel baken in a pie : 
Weel baken in a pie, John, 

And haggis in a pat, 
John Anderson my jo, John, 
Come in an' ye'se get that." 
19* 



222 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

The lady held out other allurements of a more gracious 
kind, and John Anderson, though proof against the temp- 
tations of the table, was unable to resist this rustic Deli- 
lah. We shall now turn from Percy's "Black-Book of 
Ballads," where the eld em John is to be found, to the bard 
who ventured to eke out in Brash's and Reid's " Poetry 
Original and Selected," the living and vivid strain of 
Burns. In that curious miscellany, the song is said 
indeed to be " improved" by the great Robert ; but 
though there is an occasional boldness of, expression 
which reminds us of his hand, there is also such feeble- 
ness and want of propriety as he has nowhere else exhi- 
bited. The following verse has a Burns-like sound : — 

" John Anderson my jo, John, 

When nature first began 
To try her cannie hand, John, 

Her master work was man ; 
And you amang them a', John, 

So trig frae top to toe, 
She proved to be nae journey-work, 

John Anderson my joe." 

But in the feeble warp of the succeeding verses, there is 
no weft of gold. 

" John Anderson my jo, John, 
I wonder what you mean, 
To rise sae soon in the morning, John,, 

And sit sae late at e'en ; 
Ye'll blear out a' your e'en, John, 

And why should you do so "? 
Gang sooner to your bed at e'en, 
John Anderson my jo. 

John Anderson my jo, John, # 

Frae year to year we've past, 

And soon that year maun come, John, 
Will bring us to our last ; 



THE LAND OF BURNS. * 223 

But let na' that affright us, John, 
Our hearts were ne'er our foe, 
While in innocent delight we lived, 
John Anderson my joe." 

This song was composed at Ellisland, and came from 
the muse of Bums before the dread of want disturbed 
him or the voice of the French Revolution sounded in his 
ear. He turned his furrow in hope, committed with joy 
his seed-corn to the ground, and looking up — which he 
was fond of doing — the vista of futurity, saw his own 
gray head honored, his wife in matron grace at his side, and 
his "bairns' bairns" smiling around. There is much of 
the man in all the lyrics of Burns ; and through these 
compositions his passions and his hopes, his enjoyments 
and his sorrows, may be traced distinctly. 



THE WOUNDED HARE. 



" Inhuman man I curse on thy barb'rous art, 
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye, 
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh. 
Nor ever pleasxire glad thy cruel heart." 



The poem of " The Wounded Hare" had its origin on 
Nithsdale, and in a real occurrence. Burns had gone out, 
as was his custom, along the bank of the river, to take, 
what he called, a twilight shot at the muses. It was in 
April, 1789 : the corn-braird was getting above the 
clod ; herbs were shooting out tender and green ; and a 
hare might, if she ventured* out, pick up a dangerous 
morsel on haugh or holm. He had, it seems, now and 
then observed a hare taking a nibble on his ovtni wheat- 
braird ; but so far from molesting her, he rather regarded 
her kindly as he did the mouse on a similar occasion, and 
said in his heart, — 

" I'll get a blessing wi' the lave, 
An' never miss't." 

The poor hare, perhaps, saw too that he meant her no 
harm, and took the other mouthful. But she had failed to 
earn the compassion of one of the poet's neighbors, who 
stole out on her with his gun one evening, and sent her 
wounded and bleeding past where Burns was sauntering. 
The poem was composed in the moment, and he himself 
tells us, " On a Wounded Hare, w^hich a fellow had just 
shot at." 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 225 

The curse of the poet was uttered in vain : James 
Thomson, who wounded the hare, lived to old age, 
unconscious that a malediction in rhyme had been 
delivered against him ; and I have heard him express 
much surprise, at what he called "the kippage and pucker" 
into which a random shot at a silly hare had thrown Burns. 
Indeed, he set it down as one of those distempered sal- 
lies, in which men misled by the muse are prone, it is 
said, to indulge. His own version of the story differed 
only in sensibility from that of the poet. The hares, he 
said, were numerous that spring, and he had seen half a 
dozen at a time on his father's wheat-field which lay on 
the march of Ellisland, This he did not like : so he stole 
out with his gun, and took a long shot at a hare and hit 
her, but on following with the hope of seeing her drop, 
he came unexpectedly on Burns, who cursed him bitterly, 
and said he had a good mind to throw him into the Nith. 
" And could he have done so V I inquired, looking at 
Thomson, who was both active and strong. " Could he 
hae done it!" exclaimed he, in evident wonder at the 
question; " deil a doubt but he could hae done it: he was 
mair than a match for most men." 

The field on which the hare was wounded is still 
pointed out, as well as the spot where the poet and the 
farmer had the angry parley. The latter is where the 
highland of the farm sinks into the holm, the poet's 
favorite musing place; for there he composed *' Tam o' 
Shanter," and several of his finest lyrics ; and there also 
some visiters from the south found him, with a rough fur 
cap on his head, a broadsword at his side, and a rod in his 
hand, angling for salmon. The place of itself is beautiful : 
the clover-sward bank — the green and winding hedge 



226 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

rows — the orchards and gardens of the Isle — and the 
Nith, as clear as crystal, sweeping past — are all at hand ; 
while in the distance the Carse, where the Danish whistle 
was contended for — Dalswinton, where the Comyns 
lived of old, and where steam navigation had its origin — 
the tower of the Isle rising old and gray amid its fruit- 
trees, and round which the remains of the moat are still 
visible, — connect it with the history of the land, as well 
as with the poetry. 

The criticisms which Dr. Gregory of Edinburgh ven- 
tured to make on the poem, were more severe than just, 
and irritated the poet worse than any other experiments 
which the professors of*' the ungentle craft" hazarded on 
his patience. " The Wounded Hare," thus wrote the 
critic, ''is a pretty good subject; but the measure you 
have chosen is not a good one; it does not flow well. 
The execrations in the first stanza are too strong or coarse ; 
' murder-aiming' is a bad compound epithet, and not very 
intelligible ; * blood-stained' in stanza third has the same 
fault ; ' bleeding bosom' is infinitely better. You have 
accustomed yourself to such epithets, and have no notion 
how stiff and quaint they appear to others, and how incon- 
gruous with poetic fancy and tender sentiments. * Man- 
gled* is a coarse word ; ' innocent' is a nursery word, but 
both may pass. In the title of your copy of verses you 
use the word ' fellow ;' it is a colloquial and vulgar word, 
unsuitable to your sentiments. ' Shot' is improper too : 
on seeing a person wound a hare, it is needless to say with 
what weapon ; but if you think otherwise, you should say, 
with a fowling-piece." When Bums was asked whether 
the Edinburgh literati had mended his poems by their 
criticisms, "Sir," said he, "these gentlemen are like some 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 227 

spinsters in my country, who spin their thread so fine, 
that it is neither fit for weft nor woof." And of the criti- 
cisms of Gregory on " The Wounded Hare," he said, 
" He is a good man, but he crucifies me. I beheve in the 
iron justice of Dr. Gregory ; but like the devils, I beUeve 
and tremble." 



NAEBODY. 



" I hae a penny to spend 

There — tlianks to naebody : 
I hae nothing to lend — 

m borrow frae naebody. 
I am naebody's lord, 

I'll be a slave to naebody : 
I hae a gude braid sword, 

I'll tak dunts frae naebody." 



Enjoyment always called on the muse of Burns for 
the sanction of song: he wrote — or rather poured out, 
for it was unpremeditated — the free, the happy, and 
forcible strain of " I hae a penny to spend," on his first 
coming to Ellisland. "Pleased," says Currie, "with 
surveying the grounds he was about to cultivate, and 
with the rearing of a building which should give shelter 
to his wife and children, and, as he fondly hoped, to his 
own gray hairs, sentiments of independence buoyed up 
his mind, pictures of domestic peace and content rose on 
his imagination, and a few days passed away, as he him- 
self informs us, the most tranquil, if not the happiest 
which he had ever experienced." The poet gave voice to 
these feelings in this clever song : and it was probably on 
the day he composed it that he put a fox-skin cap on his 
head, buckled a claymore to his side, and walked down 
to the Nith, where he was found angling in that strange 
trim by some southern visiters. The place is yet point- 
ed out where this interview took place, and the walk 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 229 

by the river-side where he loved to stroll when the muse 
possessed him. Yet, with youth and hope before him, 
and a kind wife and a fair farm. Burns, even in his earliest 
days of possession, was unsettled and uneasy; he rode, 
and he ran ; now he might be seen looking at the rising 
walls of his new onstead of houses ; then putting his 
ploughshare into the soil, and turning a furrow : or mount- 
ed on his horse and riding through the Nith, to seek the 
company which he thought was slow in seeking him. 

It was some time before he even settled down seriously 
into song, or got into full friendship with his neighbors. 
*• I am here," he said, speaking of Nithsdale, " at the 
very elbow of- existence ; the only things that are to 
be found in perfection in this country are stupidity and 
canting ; prose they only know in graces and prayers, 
and the value of these they estimate as they do their 
plaiden-webs — by the ell; as for the muses, they have 
as much an idea of a rhinoceros as a poet." In a similar 
strain, and perhaps with more bitterness, he thus writes 
in verse to his friend Hugh Parker. He at that time 
occupied the old smoky farm-house of Ellisland ; a 
low miserable abode, with a floor of earth, a roof of 
sooty rafters and turf, without a window that would open, 
or a chimney equal to the wants of the hearth fire. 

'' In this strange land, this uncouth clime — 
A land unknown to prose or rhyme : 
Where words ne'er crossed the Muses' heckles, 
Nor limpit in poetic shackles ; 
A land that Prose did never view it 
Except when drunk he stachered through ijL. 
Here ambushed by the chimla cheek, 
Hid in an atmosphere of reek, 
I hear a wheel thrum i' the neuk, 
I hear it — for in vain I leuk. 
20 



230 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

Here, for my wonted rhyming raptures 
I sit and count my sins by chapters : 
For life and spunk, like other Christians, 
I'm dwindled down to mere existence ; 
Nae converse but wi' Gallowa bodies, 
Wi' nae ken'd face but Jenny Geddes." 

The old smoky farm-house infected but for a short while 
the atmosphere of the poet's mind ; song soon cleared it 
up J and the intercourse which ensued with the Maxwells, 
the Kirkpatricks, the Dalzells, and the M'Murdos, made 
him aware that the land had high-souled men and spirits 
approaching to his own mental stamp. The old air of 
*' Naebody," to which the song of Burns was composed, 
had till his day been encumbered with idle and ridicu- 
lous verses; yet frequently to such snatches as the 
following the poet was indebted for his insj)iration. 

" I hae a wife o' ray ain, 

I'll be hadden to naebody ; 
I hae a pot and a pan, 
I'll borrow frae naebody." 

It would appear, too, that he thought, while he wrote, of 
the independent and jolly miller of Dee, the burthen of 
whose song was, that he cared for nobody. Burns con- 
cludes his song in almost similar words : — 

" I'll be merry and free, 

I'll be sad for naebody: 
If naebody care for me, 
I'll care for naebody." 

The task would be endless and unprofitable to trace 
the Scottish muse through the wilderness of song, and 
intimate where she has imitated and borrowed ; it may 
be said with safety, that she has seldom condescended to 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 231 

borrow from foreign sources, or to imitate strains which 
were not produced in the land of the heather and thistle ; 
and of Burns in particular it can be asserted, that he 
never borrowed, save to mend — or imitated, except to 
improve. 



THE VISION, 



' And wear thou this, — she solemn said, 
And bound the holly round my head ; 
The polished leaves and berries red 

Did rustling play ; 
And, like a passing thought, she fled 

In light away. " 



" The Vision *' was written at Mossgiel, a place fi-uit- 
ful in the poetry of Burns : he regarded it as one of his 
happiest compositions ; it has, as Currie remarks, great 
and various excellence. He at once compliments his own 
genius, and his native county. The handling is not more 
original than the conception : the celestial visitants of 
other bards find them in marble palaces, flowery fields, 
or in romantic glens by the side of crystal streams : the 
muse of the ploughman bard finds him in a humble and 
smoky abode ; and though attired for walking on sapphire 
and amber floors, she enters, without hesitation, into " the 
mottie misty clime," to cheer him from that despondency 
which dunces .never feel. It was high time to interpose : 
weary with the labor at a farm which refused a proper 
return, he sat moodily by his own fireside, and as the 
shades of night closed in, eyed the surging smoke, and 
listened to the squeaking of the rats in the thatch of his 
cottage, 

" And backward mused on wasted time " — 

how he had spent his youth, and done little, save com- 
posing idle strains for fools to sing. Had he but Hstened, 
he thought, to good counsel, he might have ruled the 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 233 

market, or presided in a banking house ; but now half- 
mad, half-fed, and half-clad, was the whole amount. 
Stung by these reflections, he raised his right hand, ac- 
cording to the custom of Scotland, to swear by the starry 
sky, or some other rash oath, that he would rhyme no 
more, when the muse suddenly entered, to stop a vow 
which she knew would soon have been broken. 

Painters and sculptors have exhausted their colors and 
their beau-ideal shapes, in attempts to embody this modest 
and beautiful visiter : while they catch celestial hues, 
and model celestial shapes, they allow the peculiar ex- 
pression and sentiment to escape. Her looks are of the 
North : she is young and lovely : her brows are wreathed 
with holly ; and she wears a robe on which are pictured 
the hills and dales, and heroes and heroines, of the dis- 
trict over which she presides as guardian muse. It 
seems to have been the wish of the poet to compliment 
the lords and ladies of Ayrshire ; and to introduce them, 
he has burdened the muse with all his patrons and patron- 
esses, as well as with their mansions and estates. " The 
robe of Coil a" is a poetic map of the county, inter- 
spersed with bits of biography. But she did not come only 
to be looked at : she thus addresses him : — .^ 

" All hail, my own inspired bard : 
In me thy native muse regard, 
■ Nor longer mourn thy fate is hard ; 
Thus poorly low ! 
I come to give thee such reward 
As we bestow. 

" With future hope I oft would gaze, 
Fond, on thy little early ways, 
Thy rudely carolled chiming phrase 
In uncouth rhymes, 
Fired at the simple, artless lays 
20* Of other times. 



234 THE LAND OP BURNS. 

" I saw thy pulse's madd'ningplay, 
Wild send thee Pleasure's devious way, 
Misled by Fancy's meteor ray, 

By Passion di-iven ; 
But yet the light that led astray 

Was light from Heaven. 

" I taught thy manners-painting strains, 
The loves, the ways of simple swains, 
Till now o'er all my wide domains 

Thy fame extends ; 
And some, the pride of Coilu's plains, 

Become thy friends," 

The poet heard these words with a rapture which he 
sought not to dissemble ; and gazed with wonder and awe 
on the muse, while she proceeded to tell him to choose 
his themes from the husbandman's cot and the shepherd's 
shei], nor aspire to the -moving warmth of Gray, nor the 
landscape glow of Thomson : fame of a humbler kind 
awaited him. As she said this, she placed her own 
wreath of holly on his head, and vanished away in light. 
Burns was not singular among the poets in desiring a 
more profitable calling than that of verse. Drummond 
thus writes of Ben Jonson : — " He dissuaded me from 
poesie, for that she beggared him, when he might have 
been a rich lawyer, physician, or merchant." Ben seems 
to have entertained the same notion of genius, as that in 
after years expressed by Johnson the second : " A mind 
of large general powers, accidentally determined to some 
particular direction." And Dryden, unaware of what 
the dramatist said, thus writes of himself: — " The same 
parts and application which have made me a poet, might 
have raised me to any honors of the gown." 



THE POOR AND HONEST SODGER. 



She gaz'd— she redden'd like a rose— 

S>'ne pale hke onie hly ; 
She sank witliin my arms, and cried, 

Art thou my ain dear Willie ? 
By Ilim Avho made yon smi and sky, 

By whom true love's regarded, 
I am the man ; and thus may still 
True lovers be rewarded." 



" I was a lad of fifteen," says Sir Walter Scott, " in 
1786-7, when Burns first came to Edinburgh; but had 
sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his 
poetry, and would have given the world to know him. . . . 
As it was, I saw him one day at the late venerable Pro- 
fessor Ferguson's, where there were several gentlemen 
of literary reputation, among whom I remember the cele- 
brated INIr. Dugald Stewart. Of course we youngsters sat 
silent, looked, and listened. The only thing I remember 
which was remarkable in Burns's manner, was the effect 
produced upon him by a print of Bunbury's, representing 
a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery 
on one side — on the other, his widow, with a child in her 
arms. These lines were written beneath, — 

' Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain — 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 
The big drops mingling with tlie milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears.' 



236 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather the 
ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed 
tears. He asked whose the lines were ; and it chanced 
that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a 
half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's, called by the unpro- 
mising title of ' The Justice of Peace.' I whispered my 
information to a friend present, who mentioned it to 
Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which, 
though of mere civility, I then received, and still recollect, 
with very great pleasure." 

With feelings akin to what the jDoet felt on the sight of 
Bunbury's joicture, Burns saw " a poor and honest sodger" 
pass the door of one of his favorite retreats, the Inn at 
BrowTihill near Dumfries. Struck with the appearance of 
this " son of Mars," with 

" That gallant badge, the dear cockade," 

the poet called him in, got him to relate his story, listened 
attentively to his adventures, felt as the soldier felt, and 
wrote as if imbued with a soldier's and a patriot's feelings : 

" When wild war's deadly blast was blawn, 
And gentle jDeace returning ; 
Wi' mony a sweet babe fatherless, 

And mony a widow mourning, 
I left the lines and tented fields, 

Where long I'd been a lodger. 
My humble knapsack a' my wealth, 
A poor but honest sodger." 

Burns has touched the strings of every true soldier's 
heart in this exquisite song ; and the air — The Mill 
MillO — is exceedingly beautiful. " The poor and honest 
sodger" was sung as soon as heard in every vale and on 
every hill ; in every cot, house, village, and town ; yet 
the Poet who Avrote it was thought by many to be no 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 



237 



well-wisher to his country ; — as if this verse came not 
from the heart of the man that penned it : — 

" For gold the merchant ploughs the main 

The farmer ploughs the manor ; 
But glory is the sodger's prize, 

The sodger's wealth is Honor. 
The brave, poor sodger ne'er despise, 

Nor count him as a stranger : 
Remember he's his country's stay 

In day and hour of danger." 

Brownhill Inn is a very nice road-side retreat. Many 
worse dinners may be had than what it supplied some 
years ago to the writer of this article. The landlord 
loved then — he may do so still — to talk of Bums, and 
point to windows that once held panes increased to fifty 
times their market value by the diamond of the poet ; 
to regret that they are not all there still — and to show 
scratches of verse, which many, unlike the worthy land- 
lord, have looked upon as enviable because genuine 
reliques. Many are the places where the admirers of 
Burns have cut lines and names in feeble imitation of the 
poet's manly hand : almost all pointed out in Nithsdale to 
the curious in such matters are forgeries ; one or two, 
among others, on the v^ndows of the Globe Inn at Dum- 
fries. At Ellisland, this solitary line was all that then 
existed from the poet's hand : — 

" An honest man's the noblest work of God." 

I hope the pane is preserved — carelessness may break it, 
and autograph-hunters and antiquarians may remove it 
altogether. 



DR. CURRIE. 



James Currie, author of the Life, and first editor of the 
Works of Barns, was bom the 31st of May, 1756, in 
Kirkpatrick-Fleming, Dumfries-shire, where his father 
was minister. He was sent while almost a child to the 
school of Middlebie ; he studied while a boy under Dr. 
Chapman, in the High-school of Dumfries ; and then 
went to the University of Edinburgh, where he acquired 
skill in physic and a taste for literature. He seems to 
have hesitated for some time in the choice of a profession : 
he thought of the army, and of the church ; and when at 
last he turned to medicine, he was uncertain in what 
quarter of the world to fix his residence. He went to 
America— ^ he returned to Scotland — but nothing per- 
manent presented itself. Accident, which has much to 
do with the fortunes of men, took him to Liverpool, where 
his gentlemanly manners, his ready skill, and his taste in 
all literary questions, made him acceptable to the mer- 
chant-princes of the place, and acceptable also to Lucy 
Wallace, to whom he was married in 1783. He soon 
became distinguished in his profession, and intimate with 
Roscoe and Rathbone, now widely known for their 
elegant attainments ; he assisted in the establishment of 
the Literary Society; wrote discourses and essays, equally 
clear and elegant ; and stood foremost of that band of- 
eminent men, who shed the lustre of literature upon 
Liverpool. His ablest professional paper is called " Medi- 
cal Reports on the Effects of Water, cold and warm, as 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 239 

a Remedy for Fever and other Diseases, whether applied 
to the Surface of the Body, or used internally ;" and to 
this we owe the happy interposition of cold instead of hot 
draughts between burning fever and human life. His 
last literary production is the Life of Burns, including his 
Dissertation on the Scottish Peasantry, prefixed to the 
works of that great poet. 

If Currie knew little of Burns personally — for he met 
him but once, and that only for a few minutes in the streets of 
Dumfries — he was well acquainted with his works, with 
his genius, and with the Scottish husbandmen, whose 
passions and manners the poet has so enduringly painted. 
His learning had not oppressed his natural tastes; his 
classic knowledge, and love of whatever was elegant, 
withheld him not from rejoicing in country-bred joys 
familiar to his boyhood ; he entered into the opinions and 
humors of the clouted shoe with the relish of true love, 
and without any of that put-on rapture too common to the 
polished and the polite. He found the papers of Burns 
in sad confusion, and he reduced them to order; he saw 
that the character of the poet was open to many objec- 
tions, and he tried to explain and extenuate ; and, with a 
merciful taste and generous feeling, he sat in judgment 
upon his looser compositions, and enabled us to taste their 
spirit without partaking of their licentiousness. His 
estimate of the genius of Burns was at once bold and 
candid ; he was the first who dared to place the peasant 
on the highest table-land' of poetic genius, and claim a 
fellowship for him with the great masters of song. This 
was the more hardy, since scholars and critics were not 
wantinor ^yho reo^arded his untutored strains as the raw 
material, rather than the finished commodity of verse ; 
and who said — and this is reported of Home, the author 



240 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

of Douglas — that he was a meteor, to flash and dazzle, 
and then pass into darkness for ever. 

The judgment of Currie was equal to his taste ; he not 
only felt the excellence of Burns, but he saw the true 
way to make his bright pictures of humble life acceptable 
to the polished and the high-born ; and obeying this, he 
wrote that first and best of all ^^rose papers on the sub- 
ject, " The Character and Condition of the Scottish 
Peasantry." This forms the clearest of all introductions 
to the poems of Burns ; we see the well-head whence all 
he has written flows ; it contains pictures which no 
painter has ever surpassed, and scenes which, for truth 
and feeling and life, few poets have ever equalled. 
What is there more vivid than his account of a peasant's 
emotions at the sound of his native music "? " After the 
labors of the day are over, young men and women walk 
many miles in the cold and dreary nights of winter, to 
these dancing-schools ; and the instant that the violin 
sounds a Scottish air, fatigue seems to vanish, the toil-bent 
rustic becomes erect, his features brighten with sympathy; 
every nerve seems to thrill with sensation, and every 
artery to vibrate with life." Of equal truth and beauty 
is his picture of the rustic lover; a theme dear to all 
lovers of Scottish song. " In the course of his passion a 
Scottish peasant often exerts a spirit of adventure, of 
which a Spanish cavalier need not be ashamed. After 
the labors of the day are over, he sets out for the habita- 
tion of his mistress, perhaps at many miles' distance, 
regardless of the length or the dreariness of the way. 
He approaches her in secresy, under the disguise of 
night; a signal at the door or window, perhaps agreed 
on, and understood by none but her, gives information of 
his arrival; and sometimes it is repeated again and again, 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 241 

before the capricious fair one will obey the summons. 
But if she favors his addresses, she escapes unobserved, 
and receives the vows of her lover under the gloom of 
twilight, or the deeper shades of night." The whole dis- 
sertation is one continued picture ; but the hand which 
delineated it was soon to become cold, like the poet 
whose works it illustrates : after repeated attacks of a 
pulmonary complaint, Currie sank to the grave in the 
fiftieth year of his age, leaving a son, who has done jus- 
tice to his father's merits in an excellent memoir, and a 
name which will be dear to Scotland while her language 
lasts. 



21 



ADDRESS TO THE DEIL. 



" O Thou ! whatever title suit thee, 
Auld Ilornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie, 
Wha in j'on cavern grim an' sootie, 

Clos'd under hatches, 
Spairges about the brunstane cootie. 

To scaud poor wretches. 



" I HAVE bought," says Burns to one of his fair cor- 
respondents, " a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually 
about with me in order to study the sentiments — the 
dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid unyielding indepen- 
dence, the desperate daring, and noble defiance of hard- 
ship — in that great personage Satan." Afterwards, to 
the same lady, but in something of an apologetical mood, 
he expresses the same opinion of the same terrible per- 
sonage : — " My favorite feature in Milton's Satan is his 
manly fortitude in supporting what cannot be remedied 
— in short, the wild broken fragments of a noble exalted 
mind in ruins." In these words, one of his critics, and 
a not unkindly one, sees the stubborn resolution of Burns 
— rather to endure with patience the consequences of 
error, than to own and avoid it in future ; but this seems 
judging too sternly of a man who indulged in inconside- 
rate sayings, and wrote down the feelings of the moment. 
Besides, these sentiments were uttered when the poet 
had been long enough in Edinburgh to perceive that he 
had little chance of rising, through the sympathy or the 
justice of those who dispensed the patronage of the 



THE LAND OP BURNS. 243 

kingdom, above the servile toil and abasing humility of 
his condition ; they must be regarded rather as words 
forced from Burns by the bitterness of disappointment, 
than the offspring of a settled purpose of soul. 

Yet Satan was a personage on whom his youthful 
mind often brooded : like a painter contemplating his 
canvas, or a sculptor his block of marble, he regarded 
the arch-fiend as a fine subject for the varying colors of 
his fancy : he thought of him too, like the peasantry of 
the land, with wonder as well as fear, and now and then 
with a familiarity less akin to dislike than to good-will. 
He had heard legends of all hues, and stories of all com- 
plexions, in which the fiend, perplexed by the subtle wit 
of one, and dismayed by the devotional spirit of another, 
fled from the land ; leaving, like Aubrey's ghost, an odor, 
which no one mistook for frankincense, behind him. 
He had heard too of sounds in lonely glens, and voices in 
desert places, and other murmurings of nature, all of 
which were placed to the dark account of Satan ; and 
out of those discordant and strange materials he proceed- 
ed to create a work at once fanciful and original ; and so 
he wrote the " Address to the Deil." Concerning its 
origin Gilbert Burns says : " It was, I think, in the 
following winter, 1785, as we were going together for 
coals to the family fire, (and I could point out the particu- 
lar spot,) that the author first repeated to me the "Address 
to the Deil." The curious idea of such an address was 
suggested to him by running over in his mind the many 
ludicrous accounts and representations we have from 
various quarters of this august personage." 

The " Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie," of Burns, is 
the fiend of the popular belief of the North, rather than 
a being on whom, like Milton, he lavished the beauty of 



244 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

form and fortitude of an archangel. He lias not indeed 
painted the horns, hoofs, and tail, with which vulgar fancy., 
has equipped this personation of the principle of evil : 
he saw that these coarse material things would interrupt 
the stream of his humor : he has therefore kept them out 
of sight while he relates his ancient and modem atroci- 
ties : and in this he has obeyed popular belief; for though 
some of the old peasants aver that they have as good as 
heard him, no one has yet seen Satan face to face. The 
poet reproaches the Fiend with the ruin which he wrought 
in Eden in the first moments of new-born love, and with 
his bitter experiment on the patience of Job ; but his 
happiest touches are those which belong to later experi- 
ences : — with what fine seriousness and humor he inti- 
mates those of his own house ! 

" I've heard my reverend graunie say, 
In lancly glens ye like to stray ; 
Or where auld ruined castles gray 

Nod to the moon, 
Ye fright the nightly wanderer's way, 

Wi' eldrich croon. 

" "When twilight did my graunie summon 
To say her prayers, douce, honest woman ! 
Aft yont the dyke she's heard you bummin, 

WJ' eerie drone, 
Or, rustling, through the boortries comin, 
Wi' heavy groan." 

To the Spirit of Evil, too, he imputes the squattering 
and quacking which affrighted himself by a lake side 
one dreary windy winter night ; also the wicked wander- 
ings of warlocks and witches on Halloween, and the 
refusal of the toiling housewife's cream to yield its 
butter, and of " dawtit twal-pint Hawkie " to let down 



THE LAND OP BURNS. 245 

her milk. Amid all his humor there is seriousness, and 
with his seriousness there are touches of a tender and 
relenting nature ; of which the concluding verse contains 
a fine example. 

" But, fare ye weel, auld Nickie-ben ! 
O wad ye tak a thought an' men ! 
Ye aiblins might — I dinna ken — 

Still hae a stake — 
I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Ev'n for your sake!" 



21* 



BURNS'S INTERVIEW WITH LORD DAER. 



" Tliis wot ye all whom it concerns, 
I, Rhymer Robin, alias Burns, 

October twenty-third : 
A ne'er-to-be-forgotten day, 
Sae far I sprackled up the brae — 

I dinner'd wi' a lord I " 



In the hasty and happy little poem, of which these lines 
form a part, Burns intimates the rustic embarrassment and 
ludicrous alarm which he experienced when he stood for 
the first time in the presence of a lord. He lived, how- 
ever, to overcome these emotions, which perhaps he never 
seriously felt, and to exclaim with the collier, when he 
snatched a drink from an earl's cup, " We're a' God's 
creatures." Yet it would appear that the bashfulness 
which he felt in the presence of Lord Daer returned 
upon him when, in after life, he visited the noble house 
of St. Mary's Isle, for he desired the company of his 
friend Syme to see him well through an interview which 
he felt would be embarrassino^. Lord Daer lived to be a 
man, but he did not live to be an earl: had that happened, 
he might have held out his hand to a Poet whose genius 
he acknowledged, for he was of a generous nature, and 
had that love of literature which seems hereditary in the 
family : we cannot, therefore, class him with the patrons 
of Bums, of whom we may reckon eight. 

1st. John Ballantine, a banker in Ayr : a worthy and 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 247 

kind gentleman, who, it is said, extended the pecuniary- 
protection of his house to the bard when pressed by- 
demands for which he was not, as a farmer, always pre- 
pared. " The Brigs of Ayr," first published in the second 
edition of his poems, was inscribed to him, and while in 
the press, he reminds him, in a letter dated 13th December, 
1786, how obscure and unknown he was when first 
honored with his notice. 

2d. Gavin Hamilton, of Mauchline, a gentleman of old 
blood, and a lawyer in good practice; whose door was 
ever open, and whose table was ever spread for the Poet ; 
and whose skill in his profession, and it was sometimes 
required in delicate matters, was constantly at his com- 
mand. He applauded his poems, too, as they were com- 
posed, and cheered him onward, when there were few to 
cheer him in the paths of fame. 

3d. Mrs. Stewart, of Stair and Afton, a lady distin- 
guished by the sweetness of her nature and the excellence 
of her taste, was perhaps one of the first who perceived 
the Poet's hio^h merit. She overheard, it is said, one of 
her maids singing a song, quite new to her, and of more 
than common beauty ; and inquired who made it. The 
girl said it was written by a young man of the name of 
Burns, whom she now and then saw. " I should like to 
see him too," said Mrs. Stewart ; and accordingly, on his 
next visit, they were made known to each other. He 
loved afterwards to talk of the embarrassment which he 
felt, and of the courtesy and kindness of the Lady, — 
the Female Form of the " Towers of Stair," mentioned 
in one of his poems. 

4th. Dugald Stewart, the accomplished philosopher, had 
a seat atCatrine,and here he was to be found when released 
from his duties in Edinburgh. He took much pleasure in 



248 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

the Poet's company, and was the entertainer when Bums 
met Lord Daer at dinner with Mr. Mackenzie. The impres- 
sion which the Poet's conversation, as well as his vigorous 
and impassioned verse, made on the philosopher, was not 
untold in Edinburgh, and smoothed the way for the iclat 
with which he was received into its polished circles. 

5th. The Duchess of Gordon, when she opened her 
doors, and held out her hand to the Poet, did more than 
many other ladies of rank did ; she went farther : she 
introduced him to her wide circle of friends in the North : 
she wrote to the South in his favor, and formed parties in 
which he might exhibit his all but miraculous gifts of 
conversation to those who had the power, if they had had 
the inclination, to do him a kindness with the Govern- 
ment. 

6th. Mrs. Dunlop, who, charmed in a fit of illness by 
the exquisite moral truth and beauty of the Cotter's 
Saturday Night, became from that moment his friend, and 
endeavored to promote his fortunes. The Poet esteemed 
her, for she was a poetess ; was descended too from aline 
of heroes, the Wallaces ; and was courteous, and tolerant, 
and kind. He felt the influence of her regard, when 
others, towards the close of his course, grew estranged 
or cold. 

7th. Henry Mackenzie, the author of the " Man of 
Feeling ;" the first true critic who, in spite of classic 
predilections, placed Burns on that high eminence after- 
wards claimed as his inheritance through nature by the 
accomplished Currie. 

8th. James Cunningham, Earl of Glencairn, was no 
poet, nor has any one said that he was much of a lover of 
literature. He was, however, good and generous; he 
took Burns at once by the hand ; subscribed largely to 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 249 

his poems ; introduced him to his own fiiends, who were 
numerous, and to the gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, 
a band of the ^lite of Scotchmen, and to whom the Poet 
inscribed the Edinburgh Edition of his Poems. The 
Earl died soon afterwards : the title is dormant, and the 
name has vanished from the northern peerage. 



CAPTAIN GROSE. 



"I 'm tauld he was a sodger bred, 
And ane wad rather fa'n than fled ; 
But now he's quat the spurtle blade, 

And dog-skin wallet, 
And ta'en the — antiquarian trade, 
1 think they call it." 



Burns met Francis Grose at the Friar's Carse, on the 
banks of the Nith, the residence of a brother antiquarian, 
Mr. Riddell, and was pleased with his manners and his 
wit, and listened alike to his Southland jokes, and his old 
world lore. It is said, nevertheless, that though they 
were brothers in humor and in the social cup, the haughty 
Englishman disliked the Scot's sallies about the rotundity 
of his person, and was mortified rather than pleased when 
he found himself described as a " fine, fat, fodgel wight," 
small of stature, though bright in genius. It is likely 
that the Poet was not ignorant of this ; and hence his 
jocular epigram, in which he represents Satan as eager 
for the soul of the antiquary, but dreading to encounter 
the immense load with which he heard his sick-bed 
creaking and groaning. Indeed, he seldom omitted an 
opportunity of having a fling at him ; even in the envelope 
which enclosed the inimitable Tam o' Shanter to Car- 
donnel, another of the northern antiquaries, he makes 
sarcastic inquiries. 

" Ken ye ought o* Captain Grose — 
Is he drowned in the Forth'? 
Or wandered mang the Highland bodies 1 
And eaten like a wether haggis ?" 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 251 

The Poet soon, indeed, discovered that Grose had but 
little in common with himself: he was a dry-as-dust 
antiquary, and thought the bard received immortal honor 
in admitting his tale of Tam o' Shanter as an illustration 
to the ruins of Alloway Kirk. On the other hand, Burns 
imagined that he helped Grose largely with his task when 
he advertised his professional visit to the ruined castles 
and abbeys of Scotland ; and no doubt his humorous 
epistle to his countrymen prepared the way both for 
Grose and his work on the Scottish Antiquities. In the 
commencement of this poem, he alarms the national pride : 

." Hear, land o' Cakes, and brither Scots, 
Frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat's ; 
If there's a hole in a' your coats, 

I rede ye tent it : 
A chield's amang ye takin' notes, 
An' faith he'll prent it." 

In the second and third verses he inti'oduces the Captain 
to his countrymen, and claims their regard to his personal 
appearance as well as learned qualities : — 

" If in your bounds ye chance to light 
Upon a fine, fat, fodgel wight, 
O' stature short, but genius bright, 
That's he — mark weel — 
And wow ! he has an unco slight 
O' cauk and keel. 

" By someauld, howlet-haunted biggin, 
Or kirk deserted by its riggin, 
It's ten to ane ye'll find him snug in 

Some eldrich part, 
Wi' deils, they say, Lord save 's ! colleaguin 

At some black art." 

He then calls on those who deal in spells and glamour, 
and on the spirits which haunt ruined halls, to tremble 



252 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

and quake at the coming of one who can let day-light in 
upon their dark doings, and expose and expel them. His 
account of the antiquarian collection of his friend is in a 
happy style. Sir Walter Scott, as he conducted a friend 
of ours, now on the remote Sutledge, through his splen- 
did armory, leant kindly on his shoulder, and repeated, 
with gi'eat unction, the following verse : — 

" He has a fouth o' auld nick-nackets : 
Rusty airn caps and jinglin jackets, 
Wad haud the Lothians three in tackets, 

A towmont guid ; 
And parritch pats, and auld saut backets 
Afore the flood." 

Grose was a man of perseverance and research ; his 
work on the military antiquities of Britain will long be a 
monument to the honor of single-handed enterprise. A 
work so extensive and minute, so curious and instructive, 
so worthy of the nation and its history, was to have been 
looked for from the crown or the government, rather 
than from a half-pay captain and an antiquary, rich in 
nick-nackets, rather than in gold. He was born at Rich- 
mond, in the year 1730, where his father was a jeweller; 
he was for some time in the Herald's College, served a 
few years in the militia and the cavalry, and quitting 
knapsack and sword, distinguished himself as an antiquary, 
and died suddenly at a dinner-table, in Dublin, in the 
year 1791. 



THE FARMER'S AULD MARE MAGGIE. 



*' When Ihou an' I were young an' skeigh 
An' stable meals at fairs were dreigh, 
Kowthou wad prance, an' snore, an' skreigh, 

An' tak the road ! 
Town's bodies ran an' stood abeigh, 

An' ca'tthee mad." 



All the great poets were lovers of horses : Homer 
has sung their praise in many a lofty line; nay, he makes 
some of his favorites of immortal descent, and even 
endues them v^ith speech : the chariot races of Pindar 
come to us w^ith the admiration of all antiquity to recom- 
mend them ; and the elegant genius of Virgil has done 
as much for the steeds of Rome as Homer did for those 
of Greece. To come to our own island poets, the 
horses of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrimage are all mettle 
and life ; the ambling palfrey of the merry Wife of Bath 
seems as skittish as its mistress. Shakspeare sang of 
them like a groom, a gentleman, a poet, and a knight of 
romance : those who can forget the Frenchman's descrip- 
tion of his battle-charger in Henry the Fifth, have 
memories unfit for retaining the glory of true poetry. 
Scott loved to breast a steed, take perilous leaps, and 
ford the Tweed and the Yarrow when foaming from bank 
to brae ; and on more occasions than one seems to lament 
that the hard-riding days of the Border were past and 
gone, when, like Moorland Willie, with dirk and pistol 
at his belt, he might have headed an inroad, or, like the 
22 



254 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

Scottish moss-trooper, wished that the English hay-stack 
had but four feet, that he might have driven it home for 
food to his horses. Nay, w^hen in London, Hogg said 
the beauty of its horses surpassed the beauty of its w^omen. 
Bums, a ploughman as vv^ell as a poet, knew all the fine 
points of the animal ; in a couplet more witty than de- 
corous, he claims an equal duty from his horse and his 
mistress : he laments the unexpected death of his bay 
mare Peg Nicholson, and regrets when he committed 
her body to the waters of the Nith : he sings, in strains 
not soon to perish, the rapid flight of Tam o' Shanter's 
grey mare Meg, and her good fortune in bearing her 
rider harmless from the pursuit of Nannie with the sark 
of Paisley harn, over the flooded Doon. 

But the finest and most touching of all poems ever 
dedicated to this noble animal, is Burns's " Auld Farmer's 
New Year's Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie, on 
giving her his customary rip of corn." The history of 
Maggie is beautifully interwoven with that of her master. 
He remembers her when a foal, trotting by the side of 
her mother, when he first went to woo his bride. As 
the courtship goes on, Maggie increases in size and 
beauty : — 

" Thou ance was i' the foremost rank, 
A nlly buirdly, steeve, an' swank, 
An' set weel down a shapely shank 

As' e'er trod yird ; 
An' could hae flown out-owre a stank 

Like ony bird." 

She had soon a graceful burden to bear to the young 
farmer's home : 

" That day ye pranced wi' muckle pride, 
When ye bare hame my bonnie bride; 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 255 

An' sweet an' graceful she did ride 

Wi' maiden air ! 
Kyle Stewart I could bragged wide 

For sic a pair ! " 

She was a witness to pleasures also of another kind, and 
had her share in the toils and glories of her master : 

" When thou was corn't, an' I was mellow, 
We took the road ay like a swallow: 
At Brooses thou had ne'er a fellow 

For pith an' speed ; 
But every tail thou pay't them hollow 

Whare'er thou geed." 

Maggie was as clever in the plough as in the race, and 
feared neither highfield nor holm : 

" Thou never braindg't, an' fech't, an' fliskit, 
But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, 
An' spread abreed thy weel-filled brisket 

Wi' pith' an' pow'r, 
Tillspritty knowes wad rair't an' risket 
An' slypet owre," 

She is now grown old : her bones have lost their vigor, 
her sinews their power, and her hide is as white as afield 
of gowans ; but her master's aftection is strong, and his 
heart is generous : 

" We've worn to crazy years thegither: 
We'll toyte about wi' ane anither: 
Wi' teutie care I'll flit thy tether 

To some hained rig, 
Where ye may nobly rax your leather 



MAN WAS MADE TO MOURN. 



'* The sun that overhangs yon moors, 
Out-spreading far and wide, 
Where hundreds labor to support 

A haughty lordling's pride ; 
I've seen yon weary winter sun 

Twice forty times return ; 
And every time has added proofs, 
That man was made to mourn." 



The moral of this mournful dirge applies to the present 
and to the future : to the present, for too many men feel 
the unjust division of honors and wealth ; and to the 
future, for if the millions who suffer under the ^ crushing 
inequality of their condition were not withheld by the 
hope of a happier hereafter, they would arise and rend 
their oppressors to pieces. That the lot of man, though 
meant by God to be cheerful, was eminently unhappy 
through injustice and wrong, was a sentiment which 
pressed, we are told, strongly on the mind of Burns. He 
used to remark to his brother, that he could not well con- 
ceive a more mortifying picture of human life, than a 
man seeking work — a sight which he could not fail fre- 
quently to see. His favorite Young might have taught 
him that other sights were equally sorrowful : one of them 
may be named — the maimed soldier, who 

" Begs bitter bread through realms his valor saved." 

And his own life furnished a still bitterer ; one of the 
noblest of our poets expiring in neglect and want. 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 257 

Burns felt that his merits gave him a claim on those who 
dispensed the extensive patronage of the empire ; and 
his haughty spirit could ill brook the humility of asking as 
a favor what he justly regarded as his right — and worse 
still the civil denial, or the cold and insulting silence — 
the general result of the applications of genius. He 
might indeed have learnt from the priest and poet already 
referred to, that he had none of the peace-offerings which 
those who rise in court-favor often make — to whom 

" A beauteous sistei-, or convenient wife, 
Are prizes in the lottery of life."' 

While feelings such as these gave life and energy to this 
fine dirge, an old ballad had a share in the moral beauty 
of the composition. " I had an old grand-uncle," says 
Burns to Mrs. Dunlop, "with whom my mother lived 
while in her girlish years. The good old man was long 
blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoy- 
ment was to sit and cry while my mother would sing the 
simple old song of ' The Life and Age of Man.' " Cromek, 
when he edited the Reliques of Burns, copied this ballad 
from the recitation of the Poet's venerable mother; cor- 
rected her version by the light which a stall copy afforded, 
which he chanced to pick up in Kilmarnock ; and publish- 
ed the result in the preface to his Select Scottish Songs ; 
a work little known. 

To this old puritanic strain Burns was more indebted 
than he has anywhere admitted : not only did he catch 
from it the moral complexion of his dirge, but he adopted 
some of its sentiments, and by a slight. change converted 
he exclamation *' Man was made to moan" into the title of 
his own poem. The old and pious minstrel says, " Upon 
the sixteenth hundred year of God and fifty-three, on the 
sixteenth day of Jgjiuary, as I lay lonely, I cried out with 
22* 



258 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

many a sob, ah ! man was made to moan !" On this, the 
voice of Nature reminded him, that the beasts of the field 
and the fowls of the air lived but for a moment, and then 
perished for ever ; while man, though born to hardship 
and sorrow, suffered, only to make enjoyment the sweeter, 
and died that he might live in perpetual happiness and 
glory. This exordium induced the minstrel to listen to 
the farther remonstrance of his monitress, who first com- 
pared the life of man to the twelve months of the year, 
and then proceeded to give a picture of the individual 
months, with the coiTesponding human portrait. Some of 
these delineations are clever — 

" Then on comes March, that noble arch, 
With wholesome spring and air, 
The child doth spring to years fifteen, 

With visage fine and fair ; 
So do the flowers, with softening showers, 

Aye spring up as we see ; 
Yet nevertheless remember this, 
That one day we must die." 

That of May, the season of singing birds, is in the same 
mood. We can only find room for the images which 
June suggests. 

" Then conieth June with pleasant tune, 

When fields with flowers are clad, 
And Phcebus bright is at his height ; 

All creatures then are glad. 
Then he appears of thretty years 

With courage bold and stout : 
His nature so makes him to go, 

Of Death he hath no doubt." 

This, after all, is but a bald ballad version of Shakspeare's 
incomparable Seven Ages of Man, and prodigiously 
inferior to the strain which it seems to have inspired. 



A WINTER NIGHT. 



" Perhaps, this hour, m Misery's squalid nest. 
She strains your infant to her joyless breast, 
And with a mother^s fears shrinks at the rocking blast 



Of the four seasons, AVinter has been the favorite with 
our descriptive poets. Thomson reversed the order of 
nature, to begin with that period of the year the most 
congenial to^iiis mind. 

" Welcome, kindred glooms ! 
Congenial liorrOrs, hail !" 

His first attempts in verse were short winter pieces. It 
was so with Burns, — sorrow, when young, gave a melan- 
choly turn to his thoughts and induced him to prefer the 
sublime melancholy of a wintry waste to all the gayety of 
the rest of the year. 

" The tempests howl : it soothes my soul, 
My griefs it seems to join ; 
The leafless trees my fancy please, 
Their fate resembles mine." 

There is something in a hilly country, — for Thomson 
and Burns were of the land of mountain and flood, — 
that calls forth contemplation in the winter season. All 
nature is laid bare, the hills and fields are covered with 
snow, the pools with ice, and the mountain-streams are 
swollen to twenty times their summer size, and come 
roaring from linn to linn, from bank to brae, with head- 
long impetuosity. All out-door occupation is at an end ; 
the redbreast seeks the society of man ; the hare, so timid 



260 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

and so fearful, forsakes its favorite haunts, and steals its 
cold meal from the kale-yard of the cotter. The doors 
are barred on the storm without, and the Christmas log 
placed on the clear blazing fire. This is the season for 
reflection. " I know of no subject," says Thomson, 
" more elevating, more ready to awake the poetical enthu- 
siasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral senti- 
ment, than the works of nature." " There is scarcely any 
earthly object," says Burns, " gives me more, — I do not 
know if I should call it pleasure — but something which 
exalts me, something which enraptures me, — than to 
walk in the sheltered side of a wood, or high planta- 
tion, on a cloudy winter-day, and hear the stormy wind 
howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It 
is my best season for devotion : my mind is wrapped up 
in a kind of enthusiasm to Him, who, in the pompous 
language of the Hebrew bard, * walks on the wings of 
the wind.' " 

In this his favorite season for serious reflection, he 
composed " A Winter Night." " As I lay," he says, 

" Listening, the doors an' winnocks rattle, 
I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war, 
And thro' the drift, deep-lairing sprattle, 

Beneath a scaur, 

"Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing ! 
That, in the merry months o' spring, 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee 1 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering wing, 
An' close thy e'el" 

In this reverie he fancies " a voice" near him, likening 
the ungenial weather to the love which man bears to his 



THE LAND OF BURNS. ' 261 

fellow-man. " Look," says this visitant, " and see how 
pampered luxury eyes the simple cotter as a creature of 
another kind, and of a coarser substance than himself. 
See how common it is for the titled great to make maid- 
en innocence a prey, and turn regardless from her tears, 

" Perhaps, this hour, in Misery's squalid nest, 
She strains your infant to her joyless breast, 
And with a mother's fears shrinks at the rocking blast !" 

Much of this poem is similar in sentiment to the fol- 
lowing noble passage in Thomson : — 

" Ah, little think the gay, licentious, proud, 
Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround ; 
They, who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth, 
And wanton, often cruel, riot waste ; 
Ah little think they, while they dance along,] 
How many feel, this very moment, death 
And all the sad variety of pain. 
How many pine in want and dungeon glooms ; 
Shut from the common air, and common use 
Of their own limbs. How many drink the cup 
Of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread 
Of misery. Sore pierced by wintry winds, 
How many shrink into the sordid hut 
Of cheerless poverty. How many stand 
Around the death-bed of-their dearest friends. 
And point the parting anguish. Thought fond man 
Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills, 
That one incessant struggle render life, 
One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate, 
Vice in his high career would stand appall'd 
And heedless rambling impulse learn to think !^' 

After this who will not come to the conclusion that the 
Poet came to, when the voice on the Winter Night was 
heard no more : 

" The heart benevolent and kind 
The most resembles God." 



SIC A WIFE AS WILLIE HAD. 



'Willie Wastle dwalt on Tweed, 

The place they ca'd it Linkum-doddie, 

Willie was awabster gude, 
Cou'd stown a clue wi' onie bodie ; 

He had a wife was dour an' din, 

Tinkler Madgie was her mither ; 
Sic a wife as Willie had, 

1 wad na gie a button for her." 



Between the beauty of the heroines of the songs of 
Burns, and the beauty of the scenes in which they lived, 
there is a close resemblance : the fine portrait has as fine 
a frame. This could not be well otherwise than acciden- 
tal : the poet, unlike the landscape painter, did not seek 
out an agreeable scene, and then look round for a lady 
to give life to its inanimate beauty. However this, may 
have happened, the fact is so ; and the opinion of an old 
dame on Nithsdale, respecting one of his songs, applies 
to them generally. " If ye wish to feel the full beauty of 
the Lassie wi' the lint-white Locks, go and sing the sangs 
to her praise in Craigieburn Wood, and among the yel- 
low broom of Kemmis-Hall." In like manner, the loveli- 
ness of the Lass of Ballochmyle is better felt in the scene 
on the Ayr, where the poet first saw her : all the charms 
of Euphemia Murray return in Glenturit : we feel the 
full enchantment of Charlotte Hamilton, on the banks of 
the Devon : the Blue-eyed Lass steals our souls away 
nowhere so sweetly as among the Lakes of old Loch- 
maben ; and if we desire to see the fair Phillis in her 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 263 

native lustre, let us go to the groves and towers of 
Druralanrig. All these scenes are worthy of the beauty 
of their heroines : the scene where the wife of Willie 
Wastle dwalt, is also in keeping with one 

*• Whose face wad fyle the Logan water." 

This song was written while Burns lived at Ellisland ; 
and though he has carried the scene to the banks of the 
Tweed, and made the unlucky hero a weaver, yet tradi- 
tion says, the unlovesome dame who supplied the por- 
trait, was the wife of a neighboring farmer well to do in 
the world. The little group of straw-thatched houses of 
which Willie was the occupier seemed unfit for the accom- 
modation of a litter of pigs ; they stood in a small hollow ; 
in summer they were covered with dust, and in winter 
half hidden in snow, or half drowned in mud ; while the 
wife, with a long nose, a long beard and long nails, and a 
visage seldom washed — though a little stream provoking 
her to ablution trotted within a penny-stone throw of her 
threshold — might be seen busied with her pigs and her 
dairy, both of which she kept tidy and clean. She was 
quite a character, and a proverb for oddity in the district. 
Her notions as well as her looks were singular : china and 
earthenware, she said, were the ruin of a house, and 
Scotland was never Scotland since timber dishes went out 
of fashion ; tea she abominated, and to the use of it 
ascribed the bankruptcy of a neighbor ; wheaten-bread, 
she was proud to say, had never passed her hps ; farmers 
had never been farmers since they quitted their saddles 
of plaited straw, for those of polished leather ; snd lasses 
had grown light in the head, and indeed light every way, 
since they had put fowls' feathers into their riggins. Thus 



264 THE LAND OP BURNS. 

she would sit for hours, maundermg to all who would listen 
about the follies and frivolities of the land ; and so glad 
was she to obtain an audience, that, though the first of 
misers, she would bribe a listener with a basin of curds 
and cream, which she well knew how to prepare. 

The writer of this was some eleven years old, when a 
message, of which he was the not unwilling bearer, car- 
ried him to the fireside of this strange old dame. She 
was sitting spinning, half shrouded in the smoke of a 
hearth fire, which, before it attempted to escape at a 
narrow aperture in the roof, eddied round and round, 
filling the whole house, and staining roof and rafter as 
black as polished ebony. She received me kindly ; seated 
me close to the fire, for there she said the smoke was least 
inconvenient for young een like mine ; and then j)roceeded 
to make for me a basin of curds and cream. This took 
some time. Such was the awe with which she had inspi- 
red me, that I had not yet ventured to look her in the 
face ; but sat eyeing the eddying of the cough-provoking 
reek,* or looking at her cat, her wheel, and the old and 
curiously carved chair on which she usually sat. At last, 
when she put a little round table, with a basin of curds 
and cream, before me, and placed a spoon in my hand, I 
looked up, and the sight I saw I shall never forget : the 
" whiskin beard" recorded by. the poet, a full finger's- 
length at least, gray and straggling, depended from lip 
and chin, and all but touched my shoulder ; while her with- 
ered cheeks, seamed brows, and gray glimmering eyes, 
at once confirmed to me the suspicion of witchcraft with 
which the fears of her neighbors honored her. I held the 
spoon filled with reeking curds within an inch of my 
mouth, while my parted lips and wondering eyes bore 



THE LAND OP BURNS. 265 

witness to the amazement with which for the first time I 
beheld a bearded woman. Her brow darkened for a 
moment — she turned away, but soon began to smile, and 
often said of m.e afterwards, " Yon's a queer callant, a 
queer callant !" 



23 



THE SPIRITS OF THE BRIGS OF AYR. 



' That bards are second-sighted is nae joke, 
And ken the lingo of the spiritual folk : 
Fays, spunkies, kelpies, a', they can explain them, 
And even the vera deils, they braw^ly ken them." 



Burns seldom saw visions, or pretended to intercourse 
with the spiritual world ; but when it was his pleasure to 
see fairies dance, witches ride, or goblins in the glimpses 
of the moon, he could delineate them with a force and 
brilliancy, equal to any painter of the shadowy children 
of fancy. His sublime *' Vision," his song of " Liberty," 
his " Tam-o-Shanter," and his " Brigs of Ayr," bear 
evidence both of his imagination and skill. To make the 
spirits who preside over masonry, ancient and modern, 
engage in angry conversation, was indeed not new: 
Ferguson had done the same for the Plainstanes and 
Causeway of Edinburgh ; and other poets, of classic as 
well as Gothic times, indulged in fictions equally startling 
and unexpected. But the merit of the " Brigs of Ayr," 
lies less in the conception than in the handling ; and here 
the bard of the country excels the poet of the town. 
Ferguson says, that one night, while the lamps of Edin- 
burgh expired for want of oil, and all the Highland 
watchmen were asleep, a wandering cadie, or porter, 
happened to overhear a sharp dialogue, in the shape of a 
complaint, between the footway and carriage-way ; and 
reported it to the Poet. Burns heard the controversy 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 267 

between the Auld Brig and the New with his own ears, 
and saw with his own eyes the splendid vision whose 
appearance silenced the debate. 

In the satiric poem of Ferguson, there is some of that 
sly quiet humor in which he excelled. " Is it not," said 
the Plainstanes, " a sad thing, that my smooth and level 
surface, made to bear the handsome feet of dames of 
condition, and men of birth and rank, should be defaced 
by the heavy hob-nailed shoes of dirty mechanics, and the 
rude tramp of Highland chairmen ; while the ladies, who 
delight to come glittering along in silk and scarlet, are 
jostled by mealy bakers, dusty masons, and dirty makers 
of wigs 1" "Friend !" said the Causeway, " you complain 
with little reason : what are the shoes of mechanics to 
those of horses or the wheels of carts and waggons loaded 
with coals and stone] I wish that a tipsy coachman 
would lash his horses, and set his iron wheels a spinning 
upon you : then there would be reason in your com- 
plaint." " Fool ! thy back is made for . the burthen," 
replied the Plainstanes : " what, save wheels of iron, and 
horses rough-shod, would venture upon thy path of whin- 
stone 1 You were made for the tear and wear of waggon- 
wheels, and horses' feet : but I was intended to bear the 
gentle tread of rosy lasses with children in their arms ; and 
respectable and ancient burghers, when they take the 
morning air." In conclusion, they agree to present a 
calm and temperate petition of grievances to the Town 
Council. 

The poem of the Twa Brigs begins in a loftier mood ; 
and, according to the practice of Burns, says something 
about himself : 

" The simple Bard, rough at the rustic plough, 
Learning his tuneful trade from every bough ; 



268 THE LAND OP BURNS. 

The chanting linnet, or the mellow thrush, 

Hailing the setting sun, sweet, in the green-thorn bush : 

The soaring lark, the perching redbreast shrill, 

Or deep-toned plovers, gray wild-whistling o'er the hill ; 

Shall he, nursed in the Peasant's lowly shed, 

To hardy Independence bravely bred, 

By early Poverty to hardship steeled, 

And trained to arms in stern Misfortune's field, 

Shall he be guilty of their hireling crimes. 

The servile, mercenary Swiss of rhymes ?" 

Having protested against the imputation of Swiss ser- 
vility, which his dedication of this poem to Ballantyne of 
Ayr might excite, he proceeds with the subject. " It 
happened in that season," he says, *' when grain is secured 
in the stack-yard, potatoes are covered in from frost, and 
the bees, rejoicing over their summer spoils, are doomed 
to be smothered, like devils, with brimstone ; that by whim 
inspired, or pressed with care, I left my bed, and saunter- 
ing aimless along the street, was on a sudden startled by 
the * clanging sugh' of wings, and the voices of the Spirits 
who preside over the old and new brigs of Ayr." One 
examined, with anxious care, the time-flawed and crum- 
bling arches of the old ; the other fluttered over the rising 
piers of the new ; when eyeing one another with more of 
envy and scorn than of goodwill, they plunged at once 
into a bitter and well-sustained controversy on the merits 
of Gothic and Grecian architecture, and the virtue and 
wisdom of the citizens of Ayr, of the ancient and latter 
times. To this keen encounter of wits we have already 
alluded, when speaking of those structures: how it might 
have ended, the Poet confesses his inability to guess : it 
was interrupted, if not extinguished, by a procession of 
bright figui^es, advancing to the sound of music cftong the 
bosom of the stream. On this vision both the Spirits and 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 269 

the Poet gazed : among the figures, he beheld the forms 
of the chiefs of the district — the Stewarts, the Mont- 
gomeries, the Cunninghams and Ballantynes ; they moved 
solemnly ; the infant ice of the stream scarce bent beneath 
their feet : Peace and Industry accompanied them. On 
this, the Spirits of the Twa Brigs forgot their wrath, in 
astonishment at the sight of shapes nobler and sublimer 
than themselves. 



23* 



WITCHES' DANCE IN TAM O'SHANTER. 



Wliile Tammie glower'd, amazed and curious, 
The noise and fun grew fast and furious : 
Tlie piper loud and louder blew, 
The dances quick and quicker flew." 



The old woman, Jenny Wilson by name, who initiated 
the boy Burns into the mystery of wraiths, death-lights, 
elf-candles, spunkies, water-kelpies, fairies, elves, ghosts, 
warlocks and witches, did a kind turn to all, and they 
cannot be few, who admire the inimitable tale of Tam o' 
Shanter. Her schooling prepared him for the task ; and 
we only regret that he did not live long enough to employ 
his fine genius on other traditions, with which his native 
land abounds. As we have, in the article on Cooper's 
escape of Tam from Nannie, spoken of the origin of the 
tale, and of the place and circumstances under which it 
was composed, we shall content ourselves with mentioning 
two other traditions of the North, for the use of some 
future poet of the Ayr, the Tweed, or the Nith. 

A farmer's wife in Nithsdale, *' word gaed she was na' 
cannie," had two servant lads, who ploughed on the same 
grounds, ate at the same table, and slept in the same bed. 
Now one was lean and haggard, the other was fat and 
fair ; and one night as they went to bed, they began to 
talk about their looks. " Why Tam, man," said Eob, 
" you are as lean as a flail, and as melancholy as a hill- 
preacher : I can see the lamp-light through your cheeks. 
What in all the world's the matter with you V " O Rob, 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 271 

man," replied the other, " ye wad na' beUeve me an' I 
were to tell you : but just lie at the bedstock as I do, and 
ye'll soon find out why I am lean and sad." They 
changed places ; and still and watchful lay Rob, resolved to 
solve the mystery for himself. All became quiet : ten 
o'clock struck, and eleven o'clock warned. Rob thought 
the ticking of his watch louder than usual, and that the 
cheap of a mouse was as loud as the squeak of a rat : at 
last, slumber began to steal upon him, and with slumber 
the farmer's wife came, shook in a moment an enchanted 
bridle over his head, uttered a word which he luckily re- 
membered, and lo ! to his own utter astonishment, he 
became a horse, was bridled and mounted in a breath, 
and urged on the way to Locher-brig-hill, as fast as a 
witch and a switch could drive him. Rob was not sure of 
his transformation till he saw his shadow in Locher-brook, 
nor of the person of his rider till she leaped down from his 
back, hooked his bridle on the snag of an oak, and, smi- 
ling on him, hastened to the trysting place, where Satan 
on that night had summoned a meeting of all the witches 
of Nithsdale. 

Poor Rob disliked his transformation ; and to be ridden 
to the devil by a witch ! he prayed inwardly, renounced 
all sins to which he felt himself inclined, formed pious 
resolutions, and all the while toiled and twisted to remove 
the enchanted bridle from his head. He succeeded in 
this at last, resumed his own shape, and, waiting behind 
the oak till his mistress returned, shook the bridle over 
her head, and spoke the word of gramary : she became 
on a sadden a gray mare ! Rob sprung on her back, and 
switched her sharply, till day began to dawn ; when, turn- 
ing her head towards a smith's forge, he muttered, " I 
shall have this bonny creature shod." But she looked so 



272 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

beseechingly at him, that he lighted down, and removed 
the curb : before he restored her, however, to her own 
shape, he bargained for a softer bed and an increase of 
wages. It is added by some, that Rob kept the bridle, 
that his mistress grew devout, and when her husband died, 
married him. 

The second story has been briefly related by Sir Walter 
Scott : in his version, he makes Thomas the Rhymer the 
hero ; but this post, in the Nithsdale tradition, is more 
appropriately filled by Michael Scott the Magician. There 
are other differences. A horse-dealer, it is said, was 
returning late one night from a border-fair with a fine 
young black horse, unsold ; when a stranger, accosting 
him, offered his price at once, saying, " Come with me 
now to the foot of that hill, and I will pay you." The 
dealer gazed on his customer, a tall old man with a beard 
as white as snow., who led the way : and when they came 
to the hill, the hill opened, and they entered through a 
lofty gateway, into a vaulted palace, which seemed hewn 
out of the solid rock, and was lighted by innumerable 
lamj^s. The old man paid the price of the horse in the 
old coin of Scotland, and then bade him step forward, 
and look how his horse was stabled. He took a step, and 
saw, to his astonishment, rank succeeding rank of black 
horses, all saddled and bridled, while an armed warrior lay 
motionless at each charger's feet. " These," said he, 
" are all Michael Scott's men, and they will awaken when 
great peril comes upon Scotland : but they will not move 
till some one comes who can draw that sword, and blow 
that horn, which you see hanging on the column." On 
this, the horse-dealer, strengthened by the brandy which 
he had drunk at the fair, stepped forward, seized the 
sword but could not draw it, then snatched the horn and 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 273 

tried to wind it : all he produced was a faint and feeble 
sound ; but the horses stamped and neighed, the warriors 
half-started up, and shook their swords ; and as Sir Mi- 
chael Scott — for it was the magician himself — exclaimed, 
" Woe to those who blow the horn before they draw the 
sword !" a tempest of wind swept the audacious horse- 
dealer out of the palace, and he was found half-dead, or 
half drunk, next morning, on the road between Dumfries 
and Lockerby. 



CORA LYNN, 



The time I saw thee, Cora, last, 
'Twas with congenial friends ; 

And calmer hours of pleasure past 
My memory seldom sends. 

It was as sweet an Autumn day 

As ever shone on Clyde ; 
And Lanark's orchards all the way 

Put forth their golden pride. 

Ev'n hedges, busk'd in bravery, 
Look'd rich that sunny morn ; 

The scarlet hip and blackberry 
So prank'd September's thorn. — 

In Cora's glen the calm how deep ! 

Its trees on loftiest hill 
Like statues stood, or things asleep, 

All motionless and still. 

The torrent spoke as if his noise 
Bade earth be quiet round, 

And give his loud and lonely voice 
A more commanding sound. 

His foam, beneath the yellow light 
Of noon, came down like one 

Continuous sheet of jaspers bright, 
Emblazon 'd by the sun. 

Dear Lynn ! let loftier falling floods 
Have prouder names than thine. 

And king of all, enthron'd in woods, 
Let Niagara shine. 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 275 

Barbarian, let him shake his coasts 

With reeking thunders far, 
Extended as th' array of hosts 

In broad embattled war. 

His voice appals the wilderness : 

Approaching thine, we feel 
A solemn, deep melodiousness, 

That needs no louder peal. 

More fury would but disenchant 

Thy di-eam-inspiring din: 
Be thou the Scottish muse's haunt, 

Romantic Cora Lynn ! 

T. Campbell, 

The three falls of the river Clyde, so greatly enhanced 
by the beauty of the surrounding scenery, are objects of 
never-failing attraction. That of Cora Lynn is pre-emi- 
nently so. Here the volume of w^ater is not precipitated 
in one continuous sheet, as at Bonnington, but is dashed 
from one shelving rock to another, so as to form three dis- 
tinct leaps, but which, when the river is full, are nearly 
imperceptible. Nothing can surpass the striking and 
stupendous appearance of this cascade. The natural 
scenery presents a magnificent picture of gigantic crags 
and hanging woods, and never fails to inspire the traveller 
with surprise and delight. On a rock immediately above 
the fall, stand the ruins of Cora Castle ; and on a lower 
ledge is seen a mill, driven by the stream, which, at the 
verge of its desperate plunge, is thus converted to the use 
of man. 

The Scotch are proud of their rivers, and speak of them 
with affection. Nor are their merits unsung : the Clyde, 
the Tweed, the Yarrow, the Doon, the Forth, and the 
Nith, run musical in many a lyric strain. High poets, 
too, have been born on their banks, or have lived in their 



276 THE LAND OP BURNS. 

vales : Campbell, Wilson, Grahame and Lockhart, with 
others scarcely less eminent, belong to the district of 
the Clyde : Allan Ramsay, too, the 

" Far-famed and celebrated Allan" 

of every Scotchman's Gentle Shepherd, was born, as he 
sings, on one of its tributary streams : 

" Of Crawfiird-Muu*, born on Leadhill, 
Where mineral springs Glengonar fill, 

Which joins sweet flowing Clyde, 
Between auld Crawfurd-Lindsay's towers 
And where Deneetne rapid pours 

His stream through Glotta's tide : 
Native of Clydesdale's upper ward, 

Bred fifteen summers there ; 
Though to my loss I'm no a laird, 

By birth my title's fair." 

Burns, the highest of them all, may be said to have 
belonged to the Clyde, since he was of the western land. 
But it is not alone in grand poetry, splendid scenery, or 
high men, that the river which throws itself over the 
Lynn of Cora is pre-eminent, and sui'passes those famous 
streams of classic lands, 

" Whose foam is amber, and their gravel gold;" 

the Clyde gives motion to a splendid series of machines 
which bring bread to the hungry, and wealth to the indus- 
trious, and spread their valuable and elegant productions 
over all the earth. 



ADDRESS TO THE TOOTH-ACHE. 



' When fevers burn, or agne freezes, 
Rheumatics gnaw, or cholic squeezes, 
Our neighbors' sjnmpathy may ease us 

Wi' pitying moan: 
But Thee ! — thou hell o' a' diseases, 
Aye mocks our groan.' 



If there be truth in song, some of our highest poets 
have endured in their own persons the " venomed stang" 
of the tooth-ache. Shakspeare often alludes to it : lago, 
to obtain credence from the Moor for his wild account of 
Desdemona's impurity, pretends that he overheard Cassio's 
unconscious confession, while kept awake by the torment 
of a raging tooth. He knew, too, how difficult it was to 
be endured, for he says — 

" There never yet was the philosopher 
That could endure the tooth-ache patiently, 
However at their ease they talked like gods." 

Nor was he without some suspicion of its cause, for he 
makes one of his characters exclaim — 

" What ! sigh for the tooth-ache, 
Which is at worst an humor or a worm !" 

Webster, a dramatist of the palmy days of the drama, 
makes Bosola, in the Duchess of Malfi, say, *' Princes' 
images on their tombs do not lie as they were wont, 
seeming to pray up to heaven ; but with their hands on 
their cheeks, as if they died of the tooth-ache." If the 
24 



278 THE LAND OP BURNS. 

poet knew, personally, that the warm palm pressed on the 
troubled cheek brought some relief, it would seem from 
the following passage in the same sad drama, that he had 
experienced that respite from pain, which the sight of 
the suro-eon and his instruments sometimes brings. 
When Bosola and the Cardinal are expiring beside him, 
Ferdinand exclaims, " You're brave fellows ! Caesar 
died in the arms of prosperity, — Pompey at the feet of 
disgrace, — but you die in the field ! The pain's nothing ! 
pain is many times taken away with the apprehension of 
greater ; as an aching tooth, with the sight of the barber 
that comes to pull it out." 

But perhaps no poet that ever suffered from this fierce 
disorder, sang of it with the truth and energy of Burns- 
That he suffered, his rhymes sufficiently prove : we have 
however his testimony in prose, delivered in a letter to his 
bookseller Creech, and written at Ellisland, on the 30th 
of May, 1789. " I had intended," he says, ** to have 
troubled you with a long letter, but at present the delight- 
ful sensations of the omnipotent tooth-ache so engross all 
my inner man, as to put it out of my power even to write 
nonsense. However, as in duty bound, I approach you 
my bookseller with an offering in my hand — a few poetic 
clinches and a song. I do not pretend that there is much 
merit in these morceaux ; but I have two reasons for 
sending them : pi'imo, they are mostly ill-natured, so are 
in unison with my present feelings, when fifty troops of 
infernal spirits are driving past from ear to ear along my 
jaw-bones." 

While enduring, and it is said with little patience, the 
pangs which he has so well described in these pithy 
words, he tried if the music of verse would charm away 
the demons that tormented him, and so poured out his 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 279 

" Address to the Tooth-ache." That no one sympathizes 
with the sufferer from this disorder, but that spectators 
enjoy with a sort of grave chuckle the visible pangs of the 
victim, the poet was aware, and says so: but even this 
inclination to moderate mirth was not to be enjoyed by 
his household : his half ludicrous agony forbade it : 

" Adown my beard the slavers trickle ! 
I kick the wee stools o'er the mickle, 
As round the fire the giglets keckle, 

To see me loup ; 
While raving mad, I wish a heckle 
Were in their doup." 

When the giggling lasses of the establishment fled from 
his presence, and the evil spirits moved along his jaws at 
a more charitable pace, tranquil thoughts arose, and reflec- 
tion came and enabled him to sum up the full amount of 
his m.isery. 

" Of a' the num'rous human dools 
111 har'sts, daft bargains, cutty-stools, 
Or worthy friends raked i' the mools, 

Sad sight to see ! 
The tricks o' knaves, the fash o' fools — 
Thou bear'st the gree." 

Nor was it in this world alone that the poet claimed pre- 
eminence for the disorder which annoyed him : he 
exclaim.s, with a bitter irreverence, — 

" Where'er that place be priests ca' hell, 
Whence a' the tones o' misery yell, 
And ranked plagues their numbers tell 

In dreadfu' raw, 
Thou, Tooth-ache! surely bear'st the bell 
Amang them a'." 

Having sung his worst of his tormentor, he concludes his 



280 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

rhyme by crying patriotically out, " O thou grim maker 
of mischief, that spreadest discord among nations, till 
men walk to the shoe-mouths in blood — hear me 

" Gie a' the faes o' Scotland's weal 
A towmond's Tooth-ache !" 



GREEN GROW THE RASHES, O ! 



' Green grow the rashes, O ! 

Green grow the rashes, O ! 
The sweetest hours that e'er I spend, 

Are spent amang the lasses, O '." 



This fine song, tlie crowning glory of all lyrical 
eulogium on woman, first appeared in the Edinburgh 
edition of the Poet's works, published in 1787. This 
circumstance has induced one of our young antiquaries 
to surmise, that a strain of such transcendant beauty was 
inspired by the looks of many, rather than by the graces 
of one : and that its origin is to be sought in the united 
charms of our high-born dames, displayed for the first 
time to the admiring eyes of the bard in the balls and 
parties of Edinburgh. This ingenious supposition is, 
however, shadowy : " Green grow the Rashes " was 
written at Mossgiel, in the month of August in the year 
1784 ; and was probably omitted in the Kilmarnock 
edition, from a fear that the daring compliment to woman 
in the last verse might give offence. That some reckon- 
ed it profane, I remember : among other death-bed 
sayings imputed to the Poet, was one expressing contrition 
for having said, that " Nature swore the lasses were her 
most perfect works, for she tried her 'prentice-hand on 
man before she made them." And this was just as true 
as the assertion, which I am concerned to say was made 
from a pulpit, that God showed his wrath with that pro- 
fane poet Burns, by sending " thunder, lightning and 
24* 



282 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

rain" to attend him to the grave ! The rich incense of 
this strain was not, therefore, offered at the shrine of 
high-bom beauty by a poet pruned and starched and 
perfumed to fit him for the service, but by a hamely, 
hearty, country hind, fresh from the plough, inspired 
only by the charms of the bonnie lasses around him. 

In the common-place book where " Green grow the 
Rashes " was written, the Poet ushered in the song by a 
curious dissertation on young men, whom he divided 
into two grand classes, the Grave and the Gay. " The 
Grave I shall cast," said he, " into the usual division of 
those who are goaded on by the love of money, and 
whose darling wish is to make a figure in the world. The 
Gay, are the jovial lads who have too much fire and 
spirit to have any settled rule of action, but without much 
deliberation follow the strong impulses of nature — the 
thoughtless, the careless, the indolent — in particular he, 
who with a happy sweetness of natural temper, and a 
cheerful vacancy of thought, steals through life — gene- 
rally, indeed, in poverty and obscurity : but poverty and 
obscurity are only evils to him who can sit gravely down 
and make a repining comparison between his own situa- 
tion and that of others : and lastly, to grace the quorum, 
such are generally those whose heads are capable of all 
the towerings of genius, and whose heaits are warmed 
with all the delicacies of feeling. The following frag- 
ment, as it is the genuine language of my heart, will 
enable anybody to determine which of the classes I 
belong to." 

This is all the Poet has recorded of this song — one of 
the earliest, as well as one of the best, of his lyric com- 
positions. An old free strain supplied the first line of the 
chorus ; the bard's experience added the rest. With 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 283 

the first three verses some rhymers would have been 
satisfied, since woman is preferred to riches and rank; 
but Burns, who was well read in Scripture, cited the 
authority of Solomon to satisfy or silence the scruples of 
the grave and devout ; and then concluded with the verse 
which will be said or sung as long as woman has charms, 
and man has taste. 

" And nature swears, the lovely dears 
Her noblest work she classes, O ; 
Her 'prentice-han' she tried on man, 
An' then she made the lasses, O." 

The perfect originality of this fine stanza has been called 
in question, and both prose and verse have been quoted, 
wiitten before Burns was born, to show that he was a 
plagiarist. But the volumes in which these passages are 
found are too rare and curious to have come within the 
reach of a ploughman lad ; and the resemblance, though 
remarkable, cannot have been otherwise than accidental. 
Arbuthnot, a grave Reformer, and principal of Aberdeen 
College, approaches the sentiment in one of his poems — 

" When God made all of nought, 

He did this weel declare : 

The last thing that he wrought. 

It was one woman fair." 

" Cupid's Whirligig," published in 1607, contains the 
sentiment almost in the words of Burns. " O woman, 
were we not born of you ! should we not then humor 
you ! Nursed by you, and not regard you ! Made for 
you, and not seek you ! And since we were made before 
you, should we not admire you as the last, and therefore 
perfect work of nature 1 Man was made when nature 



284 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

was but an apprentice ; but woman, when she was a 
skilful mistress of her art." It is not at all likely that 
Burns ever heard of "Cupid's Whirligig;" his lines are 
more pregnant with meaning, more emphatic and forcible, 
and it is likely were suggested by the Bible — a fountain 
overflowing with high thought and 23oetic impulses. 



HUSBAND, HUSBAND, CEASE YOUR 
STRIFE. 



' If 'tis still the lordly word, 
Service and obedience ; 

I'll desert my sovereign lord, 
And so good bye allegiance. 



In a little house, in a little lane called Mill-hole-brae, 
then fragrant with the effluvia of tan-pits, but since 
widened, and purified, and called Burns Street, the Poet, 
in December, 1793, composed this little humorous lyric. 
But whether he made it while balancing himself, accord- 
ing to custom, on the hind legs of his chair, or on that 
little spot of greensward near the Martington-ford, where 
he loved to muse, is less certain than that it is a Dumfries 
lyric, and written for the great work of George Thomson, 
then in progress of publication. The air to which it was 
composed is " My Jo Janet," and moreover the song 
itself is an imitation of the dramatic style of that old and 
humorous composition. For some of the sentiments he 
seems indebted to one or more sallies of the eldern muse : 
he regretted that he had not sooner turned his thoughts to 
songs of a conversational kind. 

This song extends to four verses, and husband and wife 
divide each verse between them in calm sarcastic alterca- 
tion. " Cease your strife," Nancy exclaimed; "though 
I am your wife, I am not your slave." " One of us must 
obey," replied the husband ; *' should it be man or 



286 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

woman ?" " O sir, said she, " if you hint at service and sub- 
mission as my sovereign lord, good bye to my allegiance." 
" It vs^ill be indeed a sad thing to be bereft of you, my 
spouse," sighed the husband ; " yet I'll try and make a 
shift." 

" My poor heart then break it must, 
My last hour I'm near it : 
When you lay me in the dust, 

Think, think how you will bear it." 
" I will hope and trust in Heaven, 
Nancy, Nancy ; 
Strength to bear it will be given, 
My spouse, Nancy." 

" Well, Sir, from the silent dead, 
Still I'll try to daunt you : 
Ever round your midnight-bed 
Horrid sprites shall haunt you." 
" I'll wed another like my dear 
Nancy, Nancy ; 
Then all hell will fly for fear, 
My spouse, Nancy." 

Strife of this kind is the theme of many a Scottish 
song. In " The Auld Gudeman," the strain is lively and 
dramatic ; the woman complains of pleasures lost by the 
death of her first husband, and of soitows wedded in the 
person of the second. 

" My heart alake is like to break *" 

When I think on my winsome John, 
His blinkin e'e and gait sae free 

Was never like thee, thou dosend drone. 
His rosie face, and flaxen hair, 

And skin as white as ony swan. 
He was fair and tall an' comely withal — 

Thou'lt never be like my auld gudeman." 

To this sharp reproach the puzzled husband modestly 
makes answer: — 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 287 

" Why dost thou pleen, I thee maintain, 

For meal and mautthou disna' want, 
But thy wild bees I canna' please 

Now when our cash 'gins to grow scant. 
Of household stuff thou hast enough, 

Thou wants for neither pot nor pan : 
Of sic like ware he left thee bare, 

Sae toll na' mair o' thy auld gudeman." 

" Tell na' mair o' him !" exclaimed the virago in wrath ; 
" well may I tell of him, and think of the blyth nights we 
have had together : but you ! you fold your feet and fall 
asleep : ah ! you will never be like my auld gudeman." 
The man fled, and the woman won the field. The ** Carle 
of Kellyburn braes," is another song of matrimonial 
infelicity. The devil, says the lyrist, came one day to the 
Carle, saluted him, and inquired how he did. ** I have no 
other complaint," said he " but a bad wife — for if you 
can match her, you are worse than you are called." " I 
shall try her," replied^ Satan ; and taking the wife on his 
back can'ied her at once into his own dominions ; but she 
scolded one fiend, cuffed a second, and kicked a third, till 
the bottomless pit in full conclave resolved to eject her. 
Their united wish was thus communicated to Lucifer : 

"A reeket wee devil glower'd owre the wa', 
Cries Help, master, Help, or she'll ruin us a'." 

Satan instantly carried her back to upper air. He found 
the husband holding the plough, and in a philosophic 
mood — 

" For ay as the auld carle ranted and sang, 

' In trouth my auld spunkie, ye'U no keep her lang.' " 

*'Here, man, take her back," exclaimed the fiend ; " thank 
Heaven I'm not so ill off" as you are — I'm only damned, 
I'm not married." 



THE BANKS OF DOON. 



' Oft have I roved by bonnie Doon, 
To see the rose and woodbine twine ; 

And ilka bird sang o' its luve , 
And fondly sae did I o' mine." 



This scene on the Doon lies in the Land of Bums, and 
continues to be frequented by poetic pilgrims, who love to 
look on the chief places consecrated by his muse. The river 
is but small, and its course is short: it rises in Lo'ch 
Enoch, on the borders of Kirkcudbright-shire, and in the 
neighborhood of the sources of other little, and scarcely 
less celebrated streams — the Dee, the Nith, the Girvan, 
the Stinchar, and the Cree. It obtains waters from the 
lakes of Ricar and the Star ; forms the lake of Doon, a 
sheet of fair water seven miles long ; passes the castle of 
Ralloch, the village of Damellinton, Cassillis-banks, 
celebrated in song, and Auchendrane, renowned in tra- 
gedy ; and finds its way by Alloway's auld haunted kirk, 
and Doonholm, where the poet's father dwelt, to the sea, 
some two miles or so from the town of Ayr. Of the Doon, 
few had heard till the songs of Burns gave it the fame of 
verse, and recorded its beauties in a music even sweeter 
than its own. 

In his Elegy on Poor Mailie, the Poet calls on the 
" Bards of bonnie Doon" to join in the melancholious 
sound of his reed, to the honor of his favorite ; and in 
the Epistle to William Simpson of Ochiltree, he com- 
plains that while the Forth and the Tay, the Tweed and 



THE LAxND OP BURNS. 289 

the Yarrow, are renowned in song, the IrAane, the Lugar, 
the Ayr, and the Doon, are unheard of and neglected 
and asserts his determination to make them " shine yet 
with the best." To those who are familiar with the poe- 
try of Burns, we need not say that his allusions to the 
Doon are frequent : when swollen with rains, and roused 
from its inland lakes, it is one of the many images of terror 
which he throws in the way of the heroic Tarn o' Shanter : 

" Before him Doon pours all her floods," 

and 230urs them in vain. Perhaps the tenderest notice 
which his muse has taken of the stream, is in that pathetic 
strain beginning, 

" Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon," 

in which he has intimated the melancholy story of the 
beautiful Miss Kennedy : a domestic drama, in which 
the faith and the baseness of the human character come 
out in full light and darkness. It is now from a nameless 
stream become one of renown : it is allied with some of 
the sweetest verses ever measured out to music ; let not 
therefore the obscurity of any stream be a matter of com- 
plaint, since a ray of perpetual light may be dropped upon 
it. Wordsworth truly and finely says, 

" For great and sacred is the modest claim 
Of streams to nature's love where'er they flow : 
And ne'er did genius slight them as they go, 
Tree, flow'r and green herb, feeding without blame. 
But praise can waste her voice on works of tears, 
Anguish and death : full oft where innocent blood 
Has mixed its current with the limpid flood, 
Her heaven-oflending trophy Glory rears." 

Though both the muse and mind of Burns belong to the 
present rather than the past, the sound and sight of the 
2o 



290 THE LAND OP RURNS. 

Doon called up historic recollections of days when "Wal- 
lace conquered on its banks, and Bruce " shook his Carrick 
spear." Yet he loved the present most ; and its spread- 
ing woods, flowery braes, hawthorn musical with the thrush , 
and waters sinuous and clear, had a strong and an abiding 
influence with his muse. The Banks of the Doon, where 
it rises among the uplands, may be pastoral, but they can 
scarcely be called picturesque : but when the stream 
enters the Land of Burns, the character changes, and 
hanging woods and spreading holms diversify its course : 
its' waters abate of their turbulence, and move placid and 
slow, and steal rather than run to meet the ocean. 

The poets of Scotland have one and all written of the 
chief streams of their land with resjDect and love : this 
feeling is common to the whole people, and the old Greek 
who saw gods in his fountains, and heard divine voices 
in his streams, scarcely expressed his affection more poeti- 
cally, than the hinds of Annandale continue to do. Ask 
a man from the banks of the Milk where he dwells, and 
he will say, " I live i' the water o' Milk." And indeed 
Scotchmen generally indicate their birth-place by some 
striking natural object, a river or a hill, rather than by a 
tower or a town. 



SECOND EPISTLE TO DAVIE, A BROTHER 
POET. 



' But tent me, Davie, ace o' hearts ! 

(To say aught less wadwrangthe cartes, 

And flattery I detest,) 
This Ufe has joys for you and I, 
And joys that riches ne'er could buy, 

Aad joys the very best." 



To David Sillar, schoolmaster and poet, Bums address- 
ed two of his best verse epistles. The two bards were 
comrades and confidants, both in rhyme and love : but 
how different has been their share of fame ! The School- 
master, probably encouraged by the success of the 
Ploughman, published his Poems in 1789, at Kilmarnock: 
they are on various subjects, and all alike cold and 
common-place. One of them is addressed to Burns, of 
whom he can find nothing better to say than this : — 

" I ne'er was muckle gien to praisin, 
Or else ye might be sure o' fraisin ; 
For trouth, I think in solid reason, 

Your kintra reed * 
Plays sweet as Robin Furgusson, 
Or his on Tweed. 

" Great numbers on this earthly ba', 
As soon as death gies them a ca', 
Permitted are to slide awa' 

And straught forgot. 
Forbid that this should ever fa' 

To be your lot." 



292 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

But while the honest schoolmaster of Tarbolton ex- 
presses some fears for the fate of the Ploughman as a 
poet, he gently insinuates his own hopes of perpetual 

fame. 

" I ever had an anxious wish, 
Foi-give me, Heav'n, if 'twas amiss, 
That fame in life my name wad bliss. 

And kindly save 
It from the cruel tyrant's crush 

Beyond the grave." 

Sometimes Fame in a freak saves strange verse from 
oblivion : the poetry of Sillar is redeemed from darkness 
by the reflected light of one, whom, after all, honest 
Davie seems not to have thought much of as a poet. 
It is probably to both the bards of Tarbolton and Muirkirk 
that Burns alludes, when he complains that his success 
brought forth from obscurity such a shoal of ill-spawned 
monsters, as had put Scottish poetry into disgrace. 

Both of these Epistles are early compositions, and 
were vnritten before the publication of the Kilmarnock 
edition of the poems of Burns. The first is altogether 
beautiful, both in its sadness and its joy : in the second 
verse, he quietly declares, 

" It's hardly in a body's pow'r 
To keep, at times, frae being sour, 

To see how things are shar't ; 
How 'best o' chiels are whiles in want, 
While coofs on countless thousands rant, 

And ken na how to wair't." 

In the fourth verse, he lifts up his voice, and while he 
cheers his own heart, he infuses joy into the hearts of all. 

" What though like commoners of air, 
We wander out, we know not where, 
But either house or hall 1 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 293 

Yet nature's charms, the hills and woods, 
The sweeping vales, and foaming floods, 

Are free alike to all. 
In days when daisies deck the ground, 

And blackbirds whistle clear, 
With honest joy our hearts will bound, 

To seethe coming year." 

The Second Epistle is in another strain — free, care- 
less and happy, but without the high philosophy of its 
elder brother : Barns was at that time preparing his 
poems for the press. 

" For me, I'm on Parnassus' brink, 
Rivin the words to gar them clink, 
Whyles daez't it wi' love, whyles daez't it wi' drink, 

Wi' jads or masons ; 
An' whyles, but ay owre late, I think 

Braw sober lessons." 

When Professor "Walker prepared his life of Burns, 
David Sillar supplied some happy and interesting par- 
ticulars. The Ploughman Poet, he said, wore a fillemot 
plaid ; had the only tied hair in the parish ; was fond of 
reading while he walked, and fonder still of conversing 
with the ladies ; loved to infuse a certain sarcastic sea- 
soning into his talk with the rougher sex ; and it was 
said by the old man, that he had ay owre much to say for 
himself, and that they suspected his principles. Sillar was 
a kind and a good man ; lived to an advanced age ; 
became ambitious, " in some bit burgh, to represent a 
bailie's name," and obtained that distinction in the town 
of Irvine. 



25* 



INTERIOR OF THE BIRTH-PLACE OF 
BURNS. 



" The gossip keekit in his loof, 
Quo' she, wha lives will see the proof, 
Tliis waly boj' will be nae coof, — 

I think we'll ca' him Robin. 
"He'll hue misfortunes great an' sma', 
But ay a heart aboon them a' ; 
He'll be a credit till us a, — 

We'll a' be proud o' Robin." 



So sang the Bard of Coila, concerning his own birth- 
day ; he lived to fulfil so fully the prophecy of his 
verse, that he is a credit to his country ; and all the sons 
of Scotland rejoice in the Patriot and the Poet. The 
exterior of the cottage in which he was born, — where 
his mother, in the words of the old strain, "dreed the 
birth-time pang," has been already described. It has now 
become a place of entertainment for travellers, and offers 
the allurement of good ale, and anecdotes of Burns. This lit- 
tle hovel has been delineated by the pencil, carved by the 
chisel, described in prose, and eulogized in rhyme : it has 
been lectured upon, preached upon, and prayed upon ; 
princes have paused to gaze at it as they passed ; poets have 
mused there, in the hope of catching some yet lingering in- 
spiration ; and composers of tours and biographies have wan- 
dered about it, to pick up crumbs of intelligence, and lay 
down the points and bearings of northern genius. Stil), 
for all this, the popular taste is unsatisfied : when all is 
seen that can be seen, and all described that can be 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 295 

described, the public fancy has imagined a scene of its 
own, with too much of poetry and paradise in it for the 
most romantic of all the real places consecrated by the 
genius of Burns. 
/ The sunniness, and sweetness, and elegance of the 
/ Poet's songs, contrast strangely, sometimes, with the 
scenes where they are laid, as well as with the now faded 
and wrinkled dames which they celebrate. Ten thousand 
times ten thousand travellers might pass the humble 
shealing nigh the Doon, without suspecting that they trod 
on classic ground, or inhaled empyrean air. " The whole 
land of Burns," says a bard, and a high one, '* is beauti- 
ful ; but much of the beauty is the work of the Poet ; the 
daisy was but a weed, and the mouse but worthy of the 
pettle, till he invested them with moral and sublime attri- 
butes. The Banks of Doon, the Braes of Ballochmyle, 
and the Moors of the Lugar, would receive from us but a 
glance of hurried pleasure, did we not know that there 
the muse has left her footsteps, and consecrated all that 
she touched. Kirk Alio way would be a rude ruin ; the 
cottage where Bums was born, a tinker's hovel ; the 
Doon, a stream of no note; and the Ayr remarkable only 
for the whetstones, did not a halo, brighter than that of 
nature, — hung like a light round the brow of some dusky 
apostle, — steep them in the hues of heaven." 

The birth-day of Burns is regularly celebrated, we are 
told, in his birth-place, by a few of the true spirits of the 
Doon and the Ayr ; but it is not by his native streams 
alone that rejoicings take place on the twenty-fifth day of 
January ; the Tweed, the Clyde, the Yarrow, and the 
Nith, have also their festivities ; and their example has 
extended to the Thames, the Tees, the Tyne, the Seveni, 
the Mersey, and the Ouse ; the Green Isle too shares with 



296 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

US in this ; and on the Liffy and the Laggan, the Shannon 
and the Bann, the name of Scotia's Poet is toasted. It 
would be unfair to forget that America loves the bard who 
sang *' A man's a man for a' that ;" and that India 
remembers who wrote " Will ye go to the Indies, my 
Mary ]" On the sea-like rivers of these two great lands, 
convivial lamps and candles sparkle, and social toasts are 
given, and Scottish songs sung, on the return of the 
birth time of Burns ; nay, remote China has been startled 
with the note of the bag-pipe, and the vociferous strains 
of Caledonians, on that happy night. 

For ourselves, we feel, when the twenty-fifth of 
January comes its annual round, the joy which lovers of 
nature feel in the coming of the daisy, and the renewed 
note of the thrush. We begin, unconsciously, to hum 
Burns's birth-day song, and our feet move of their own 
accord, as the sun goes down, towards the well-spread 
table of a high-souled " Commoner" of the Poet's own 
beloved " West Country." We regard him with a sort 
of awe, as he draws forth from its velvet retreat the real 
marble punch-bowl of the great Robert ; we look on, in 
" silent expectation," while he fills to the brim with the 
liquor which the poet loved ; and, putting his own lips 
reverently to the marble, and handing it round solemnly 
to his guests, desires them all to drink 

" The immortal memory of Robert Burns." 

When hands grow unsteady, the relique is returned to its 
sanctuary, and its place supplied by a splendid chappin 
stoup of solid silver, emblazoned by the skill of a gifted 
Caledonian, with scenes from the songs and poems of 
Bums. 



THE RIGS 0' BARLEY. 



"I hae been blythe wi' comrades dear ; 

I hae been merry drinkin' ; 
I hae been joyfu' gatherin gear 

I hae been happy Ihinkin 
But a' the pleasures e'er I saw, 

Though three times doubled fairly, 
That happy night was worth them a' 

Among the Rigs o' Barley." 



No old or neglected strain can claim a share in " The 
Rigs o' Barley" of Burns. It is one of his earliest com- 
positions ; and was, perhaps, a favorite, — for he placed 
it foremost of the four songs admitted into the edition of 
his poems printed at Kilmarnock. It was composed, it is 
believed, in the year 1784, and claims, we are told, its 
inspiration from the charms of Annie Ronald, a farmer's 
daughter, who, when she became Mrs. Paterson, of Aiken- 
brae, and was head of a house, had no wish to hear the 
song either sung or alluded to. For this we can excuse 
her. There is sometimes in the songs of Burns, and in 
this one as much as any, such freedom and warmth, as the 
heroines, mostly modest and delicate women, might wish 
abated ; though the freedom was that of innocence, and 
the warmth that of pure love, still a lady w^ould feel 
inclined to flutter her fan on reading such audacity, and 
be inclined to rebuke it. The Poet, in an after song, has 
alluded to this irreverence of approach, as a critic has 
called it. 



298 THE LAND OP BURNS. 

" Her eyes sae bonnie blue betray- 
How she repays my passion ; 

But prudence is her o'erword ay, 
She talks of rank and fashion. 

O wha can pi-udence think upon, 
And sic a lassie by him 1 

O wha can prudence think upon, 
And sae in love as I am 1" 

We know not how much the Annie of the year 1784 
shared in the sentiments of the matron of Aikenbrae ; but 
we can see nothing to make the wife or the mother dislike 
a song which has made her merits imperishable. It is 
strictly in keeping with the romantic love-trystes, and 
wooing under the moon, common to the poetic peasantry 
of Caledonia : their chamber is the fragrant shelter of a 
wood ; their candles the stars of the sky ; and this confi- 
dence in one another's hearts is but rarely abused. It is 
said that one of Annie's sisters, in allusion to the visits of 
the Poet, tartly declared, " that she could na see aught 
about Bob Burns that wad tempt her to sit up wi' him till 
twaV o'clock at night." 

We have said that no old or neglected strain can claim 
a share in this song : we ought to have remembered that 
two lines of the chorus, — 

" Corn rigs and barley rigs, 

And corn rigs are bonnie," — 

are older than the days of Ramsay ; one of the songs of 
his Gentle Shepherd seems written on an evident acquaint- 
ance with these lines at least. The old verses still linger 
in old men's memories ; they have been pronounced silly; 
they are certainly not of a high order, yet they are 
natural ; and, like most of the lyric strains of the elder 
days of Scotland, resemble nothing else under the sun. 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 299 

" There was a piper had a cow, 

But he had nought to gie her ; 
He took his pipes and played a spring, 

And bade his cow consider. 
The cow considered very weel, 

And gae the piper a penny, 
To play the same tune owre again, — 

Corn rigs are bonnie !" 

** All the old words," says Burns, in his Notes to the 
Museum, ** that ever I could meet with to this air were 
the following, which seem to have been an old chorus : — 

" O corn rigs and rye rigs, 
O corn rigs are bonnie ; 
Where'er you meet a bonnie lass, 
Preen up her cockernony.' " 

Choruses, by adhering to the tunes, have been pre- 
served, frequently, when the songs, of which they formed 
a part, have been lost ; from a due consideration of these 
airs and fragments, we may safely conclude that Scotland 
of old had many songs, relating to trades, pursuits, and 
professions, which belonged, hke the flags, and cups, and 
pictures, and Bibles, to bodies corporate. Some of these 
songs wer^ in honor, others in scorn; the bard of the 
mEisons scorned the shoemakers ; the poet of the shoema- 
kers despised the tailors ; while the husbandman had a 
strain, in which he asserted the dignity of the ploughshare 
over all callins^s. 



ELLISLAND. 



* Adown winding Nith I did wander, 

To mark the sweet flowers as they spring ; 

Adown whiding Nith 1 did wander, 
Of Phillis to muse and to sing." 



Ellisland stands on the southern side of the river 
Nith, some seven miles up the stream from Dumfries, and 
crovvns a precipitous scaur, or bank, below which lie the 
rich holms of Dalswinton, Carnsalloch, and Portrack. 
The situation is beautiful. The farm, as a good judge 
observed to Burns, seemed chosen more for its fine pros- 
pects than its rich pastures : it is part holm, and part 
croft. The road from Glasgow to Dumfries passes it on 
the south ; the Nith bounds it on the north ; eastward the 
tower and lands of the Isle skirt it ; while on the west it 
unites with the woods of Friar's Carse. Burns, in the spring 
of the year 1788, took a three nineteen years' lease of Ellis- 
land, from Miller of Dalswinton, on terms prescribed by his 
own friends, and planned the present dwelling-house, bam, 
byre, and cattle sheds ; and while the masons and joiners 
were busy, he was busy also, for he saw every stone as it 
was laid, and every bit of timber squared, and loved 
to afford his help when strength was needed. While 
these humble structures were erecting, the Poet's wife 
was residing in Ayrshire, but he sheltered himself in the 
old farm-house of Ellisland, to which a wigwam is a 
palace ; and there, on wet days, which are frequent in the 
moist north, amid smoke and soot-drops, he strove to amuse 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 301 

himself with speculating on the future profits of his 
grounds, or visiting the Riddels, the Millers, the Coplands, 
and Maxwells of the vale ; and in amending or composing 
songs for the Musical Museum of Johnson. 

The farm-house of Ellisland was reckoned no humble 
one in the year of grace 1788 ; and when the walls were 
plastered, its floors of hewn stone and deal laid, and its 
slate roof on, frugal people began to talk of the Poet's 
extravagance, and bode no good to his speculations. 
When spring came, he might be seen holding his own 
plough for an hour, or with a sheet across his shoulder, 
realizing the image of thrift, in one of his earliest songs, 

" With joy the tentie seedsman stalks ;" 

but his chief pleasure was to wander on the banks of the 
Nith, composing his mind, for the Nithsdale Muse, who 
seemed for a time less willing to be his inspirer than was 
his own Coila, on the Doon and the Ayr. In the walk 
up the stream, rough as it was with hazel and briar, he 
loved to indulge, when the river, swollen with upland 
rains, after chafing against the free- stone rock on one side, 
and a bordering of oak and ash on the other, freed itself 
at the Fleucher-ford, and came Ellisland-ward, foaming 
from bank to brae, and reddening its current with the 
loamy clay, washed from the scaur on which the Poet 
stood. This was a scene he confessed that he loved to 
contemplate ; but the walk most productive of poetry 
was the one which conducted him from his house down 
the river-side, — a beautiful path, covered with wild clover 
and gowans, in the season, and which gradually descends 
from the upper ground occupied by the house, till it ap- 
proaches so close to the river, that one may dip his foot 
in it as he saunters along. 
26 



302 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

It was in this favorite walk that Bums composed the 
Wounded Hare, the Elegy on Captain Henderson, the 
song called To Mary in Heaven, and, last and best, his 
Tarn o' Shanter. While composing the ode to his Mary, 
he was under the influence of more than the ordinary pas- 
sion bestowed by the Muse : it was the anniversary of her 
death ; he became, as the evening advanced, thoughtful 
and restless ; he tried to read, to converse, and to medi- 
tate, — all was in vain ; he at length rose, and, though the 
night was cold, walked to the river-side. He stopped 
long : Mrs. Bums grew uneasy ; and, though reluctant at 
all times to intrude on his studies, she ventured to follow 
him ; he was not in his favorite walk by the Nith, nor yet 
by the wood-side : at length she found him in the stack- 
yard, stretched on a heap of straw, gazing upwards at a 
star, and repeating aloud the first line of his celebrated 
song. For some time she refrained from speaking ; at 
last he saw her, and was prevailed upon to arise, and go 
with her to the house, where he continued to muse till he 
finished his affecting ode. In the following exquisite 
verse, he seems to have had the banks of the Nith at 
Ellisland, as much as those of the Ayr at Coilsfield on his 
fancy : — 

" Ayr gurgling kiss'd his pebbled shore, 

O'erhung with wild-woods, thickening, green ; 
The fragrant birch, and hawthorn hoar, 

Twined amorous i-ound the raptured scene. 
The flowers sprang wanton to be prest, 

The birds sang love on every spray. 
Till too, too soon, the glowing west 
Proclaim'd the speed of winged day." 

While composing Tam o' Shanter, his ecstasy, though of 
a more joyous kind, was sufficiently serious : he walked 
hurriedly to and fro by the river-brink ; he lengthened 



THE LAND OF BURNS, 303 

his steps as he became more and more possessed ; he 
recited his poem aloud, as it arose rapidly on his fancy, 
and the tears were running down his cheeks in the rap- 
ture of composition. Such was the account of Mrs. Burns, 
who witnessed it. Ellisland is now the property of 
Joseph Taylor, Esq. 



A FAMILY IN HEAVEN. 



" When soon or late they reach that coast 
O'er life's rough ocean driven, 
May they rejoice, no wanderer lost,' — 
A family in heaven !" 



The subject present to the mind of Burns, in this 
brief but beautiful poem, has frequently inspired others 
— artists as well as poets. Blake, in one of his remark- 
able illustrations to Blair's Grave, — a noble and very 
original poem, — delineates a family group, removed from 
the domestic hearth to the threshold of paradise, and 
exhibits them brightened with a halo, half of earth and 
half of heaven. Other painters have ventured to embody 
similar scenes. The paintings of the great masters of 
Italy abound with corresponding creations ; for in no 
other land has poetry poured forth more of her spirit on 
canvass, or kindled her lights half so divinely in the cause 
of religion. The splendid churches of that fine country 
are filled with these magnificent works ; good men and 
pious women are raised from this gross earth, and throned 
on clouds, or seated among the angels ; and children, — 
for of such is the kingdom of Christ, — wander, clothed 
with the sun, with seraphs and souls of the just made per- 
fect. The mind and the imagination of the pious specta- 
tor felt the influence of those magnificent pictures, and the 
great painters of Rome shared in the fame and in the 
wealth of the church. 



THE LAND OP BURNS. 305 

Into the simple, plain, unpretending Kirk of Scotland, 
art of no kind has been permitted to enter j the inspira- 
tion of Scripture, and the eloquence of the preacher, are 
entrusted with the task of exaltino^ the minds of the con- 
gregation into true fervor and devotion ; neither the 
refinements of taste, nor the grossness of the senses, are 
appealed to ; it is a matter of faith and understanding, 
rather than of the eye. The New Testament nowhere 
insists on the personal loveliness of the Virgin, or on the 
Apollo-like beauty of our Saviour ; and hence the Pres- 
byterian form of worship has, on account of its perfect 
simplicity, been accused of looking bald and bare — 
uninviting and uninspiring. 

The family, whose meekness, modesty, and domestic 
enjoyments inspired the poem of Burns, was that of Dr. 
Lawrie, minister of the parish of Loudon. It is entitled, 
" Lying at a reverend friend's house, one night, the 
author left the following verses in the room where he 
slept." Lawrie was a generous man, and a good scholar ; 
he loved to see the Poet at his manse, and relished both 
his verse and his conversation. " The first time," says 
Gilbert Burns, '' that Robert heard the spinnet played, 
was at the house of Dr. Lawrie, then minister of Lou- 
don, now in Glasgow, having given up the parish in favor 
of his son. Dr. Lawrie had several daughters : one of 
them played ; the father and the mother led down the dance ; 
the rest of the sisters, the brother, the Poet, and the other 
guests, mixed in it. It was a delightful family scene for 
Robert, then lately introduced to the world : his mind 
was roused to a poetic enthusiasm, and the stanzas were 
left in the room where he slept." 

This happened, it would seem, soon after the publica- 
26* 



306 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

tion of the Kilmarnock edition of liis poems, and when 
some " ill-advised people had uncoupled the merciless 
pack of the law at his heels." The great merit of the 
volume, and the elegant praise of the verses which he 
composed on the family, induced Dr. La\vrie to speak of 
Burns and his merits to the blind bard, Blacklock, whose 
high commendations induced the Poet to stop his chest, 
then on the way to Greenock, turn his face from the 
West Indfes to " Edina, Scotia's darling seat," and 
resolve that his farewell, beginning thus — 

" The gloomy night is gathering fast," 

should not be the last strain poured from his harp in the 
land of Caledonia. The world is sometimes disinclined 
to sanction the commendations of the tasteful and critical ; 
but the event justified Blacklock's counsel, and the Poet's 
resolution. Burns was a child of impulse, — the impulse 
this time was -right ; the voice that called was one from 
heaven. " Many instances," says Blacklock to Lawrie, 
" I have seen of nature's force or beneficence, exerted 
under numerous and formidable disadvantages, but none 
equal to that with which you have been kind enough to 
present me. There is a pathos and delicacy in his serious 
poems, a vein of wit and humor in those of a more 
festive turn, which cannot be too much admired, or too 
warmly approved ; and I think I shall never open the 
book without feeling my astonishment renewed and 
increased. It were much to be wished, for the sake of 
the young man, that a second edition, more numerous 
than the former, should immediately be printed ; as it 
appears certain that its intrinsic merit, and the exertions 
of the author's friends, might give it a more universal 
circulation than anything of the kind which has been pub- 



THE LAND OP BURNS. 307 

lished in my memory." The poem in which Burns 
records the worth of the house of Lawrie, is in the form 
of a prayer : each verse contains a fine picture of the 
pious sire, the tender mother, the dutiful son, and the 
beauteous daughters, and closes with raising them from 
earth, and placing them " A Family in Heaven." 



GLOBE CLOSE, DUMFRIES, 

(the iiowff of burns.) 



" Yestreen I had a pint o' wine, 
A place where body saw' na ; 
Yestreen lay on this breast of mine 
The gowden locks of Anna." 



The Tabard Inn, where Chaucer caroused with the 
Canterbury pilgrims ; the Boar's Head, where some of 
the heroes of Shakspeare, in new satin, discussed old 
sack; the Mermaid Tavern, made famous by the learning 
and wit of Ben Jonson ; Wills's, which Dryden frequented, 
and where Pope, when a boy, went to look at him ; 
Button's, made eminent by the socialities of the classic 
Addison ; and Ambrose's, distinguished in our day by 
the poetic sallies of the chief wits of the North ; are all 
places rendered immortal by the Muse ; nor can we say 
less of Poosy Nansie's, Auld Nanse Tinnock's, and The 
Howff, endeared to all lovers of sociality and song by 
the genius of Burns. Places which in themselves would 
pass unheeded, and which have no pretence to beauty, 
or claims on the picturesque, become both, the moment 
they are allied to an imperishable name ; all the places 
we have mentioned are without any interest, save what 
association bestows. The Tabard Inn is very old, and 
not very neat ; but the name Chaucer hangs its walls 
with tapestry. The Howff is in a dark street ; its walls 
are dusky, and its ceilings low; but the voice of the Poet 
calls down light from above upon it : and all who love 



THE LAND OP BURNS. 309 

his memory pass with reverence its sanded threshold, 
rest themselves in the little parlor, where he indulged 
in his humors, and call for a glass of that pure liquor 
which its inspired occupant relished. 

The Globe Tavern is situated in the Globe Close, 
nearly opposite the George Inn, and a little below the 
King's Arms, in the high, or principal street of Dumfries. 
It was once a place of note, and regarded as the second- 
best tavern in the town, and was occupied by the young 
and beautiful Countess of Airlie, when, in 1745, Dum- 
fries fell into the hands of the Highland chiefs. Nor is 
it without a legend of those times. A certain squire of 
the north of England, of the ancient name of Vane, 
who held rank in the rebel host, saw that the adventure 
was sure to end tragically, and became desirous to escape. 
This was, however, no safe experiment ; he communica- 
ted his wishes to the landlord of The HowfF, who, at great 
personal jeopardy, concealed him, till the pipes of the 
clans summoned the army to depart, and then helped him 
to a disguise, in which he made his escape into England, 
and finally to France, where, it is said, he afterwards 
found one of the sons of his benefactor in prison, and 
released, and clothed, and sent him back wealthy to Dum- 
fries. The more serious portion of the people of the 
town persist in calling this tavern The Globe ; but all 
who have a liking to the memory or the poetry of Burns, 
call it " The HowfT," in imitation of the bard of Coila. 
" This," he says, in a letter to Thomson, '* will be delivered 
to you by a Mrs. Hyslop, landlady of the Globe Tavern, 
here ; which, for these many years, has been my Howft', 
and where our friend Clarke and I have had many a 
meiTy squeeze." 

In The HowfF, the liquor was abundant and good, and 



310 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

the attendant maidens of the hostess handsome and 
biddable ; there Burns was in the practice of taking 
strangers, who desired an evening hour of his company ; 
there he often sat with two or three social companions, 
talking of the miseries of dependence ; there he loved to 
give " an hour's discharge to care," over a pint of wine, 
and talk to Anna of the gowden locks, who was related 
to the mistress of the house. It was there, too, that he 
recited his election lampoons to Professor Walker; and 
as the noise and fun grew fast and furious, seemed 
reluctant to leave the empty bowl ; and it was there, too, 
that he indulged, one frosty night, in prolonged socialities ; 
and, falling asleep on his way home, increased that 
" slow consuming illness," which carried him to an un- 
timely grave. The Howff still bears evidence of the 
presence of Burns. " I visited it," says an admirer of 
the poet, " in the summer of 1834, and found it a decent 
inn, with fair accommodation, good liquor, and good one- 
horse chaises. The favorite corner where the Poet loved 
to sit, was pointed out ; and I was directed to the win- 
dows, on which many diamond pencils had tried to 
imitate the bold, manly hand of the bard. Some of these 
scribblings were lines from his songs, and some of them 
were the names of dames whom his too complaisant 
Muse had honored. Though I saw nothing which I 
could receive as the offspring of his own hand, the place 
is well worth a visit ; the lane, or close, as it is called, is 
picturesque though narrow; the windows are all, I think, 
on one side ; and the light, which even on a sunny day 
they admit to the rooms, is dim and insufficient. But 
when lighted up on a market-night, The Howff is in its 
glory ; its rooms are crowded with lads and lasses, 
jocund and joyous— with grave matrons and douce men, 



THE LAND OP BURNS. 311 

taking a farewell glass ; — with dealers in cattle, traders 
in corn, travelling merchants, all drinking, all talking, and, 
generally, all contented ; while among the whole, the 
bustling hostess and her active maidens are busy distri- 
buting liquor, and receiving cash. Such was The HowfF 
when I saw it." 



A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT. 



' What though on hamely fare we dine, 

Wear hoddin-gray, and a' that ; 
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,- 

A man's a man for a' that. 
For a' that, and a' that. 

Then- tinsel show, and a' that ; 
The honest man, though e'er sae poor, 

Is king o' men for a' that." 



This manly song was written in the Poet's little home- 
ly house, in Mill-hole-brae, now Burns Street, Dumfries, 
and communicated to George Thomson, in the following 
words, in January, 1795: — "A great critic, Aikin, on 
Song, says that wine and love are the exclusive themes for 
song-writing. The following is on neither subject, and, 
consequently, is no song ; but will be allowed, I think, to 
be two or three pretty good prose thoughts, inverted into 
rhyme." Thomson seems to have received this noble 
lyric very coldly ; but those acquainted with the feverish 
state of the public pulse in the year Ninety-five, will not 
be surprised even had he treated it ungraciously ; in those 
days Europe was up in arms, — 

" Cannons were roaring, and bullets were flying;" 

and France was putting forth, in favor of liberty, those 
terrible energies which nearly made her mistress of the 
world. Our rulers saw revolution in all the movements 
of the people; and heard sedition and treason in every 
public murmur : the actions of Burns were watched, and 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 313 

all his words weighed, and his *' Man's a man for a' that," 
was sung as secretly as was " You're welcome, Charlie 
Stuart," in the days of the Jacobite rebellions. 

A strain of this character seems to have been present 
to the mind of Bums from the time he read Pope's line, 
claiming an honest man as the noblest work of God ; and 
composed his affecting poem, " Man was made to mourn." 
It is a popular exposition of sentiments he had long enter- 
tained ; and though called into life by the fierce voice of 
the times, not a sentiment is uttered which is not natural 
to the heart of genius. Yet let no one imagine that he 
desired to cure the disorders which " Ribbons, stars, and 
a' that," had wrought in the land, by calling in the 
republican sword of France ; he longed for liberty ; he 
wished to see talent enjoying the honors which hereditary 
dulness had usurped ; but he felt this ought to be accom- 
plished by native hands, or not accomplished at all. He 
has in another song clothed this sentiment in words which 
can never be forgotten : — 

" O let us not, like snarling curs, 

In wrangling be divided ; 
Till slap come in an unco loon, 

And wi' a rung decide it. 
Be Britain still to Britain true, 

Amang ourselves united; 
For never but by British hands 

Maun British wrongs be righted." 

Having freed Burns from a charge, not seldom made, of 
desiring the help of foreigners to bring about more equal 
legislation, we may quote, without fear, some of the 
sharp stanzas of the stinging strain, *' A man's a man for 
a' that." In the first verse he vindicates poverty from the 
scorn of wealth. 
27 



314 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

" Is there, for honest poverty, 

That hangs his head, an' a' that; 
The coward-slave, we pass him by, 

We dare be poor for a' that. 
For a' that, and a' that, 

Our toils obscure, and a' that ; 
The rank is but the guinea-stamp — 
The man's the gowd for a' that." 

Had the poet lived in these latter days, he would likely 
have accepted the help of the new coinage to heighten his 
satire, and written — 

" The rank is but the sovereign stamp." 

Having disposed of the merely wealthy — of men who, 
like striped pumpkins, grew and swelled up on the great 
midden-stead of scheming and calculation, and sprinkled 
a little of the nitric acid of his musfi on ribbons and stars, 
he approaches the throne, and that with no ceremonious 

bows. 

" A king can make a belted knight, 
A marquis, duke, an' a' that ; 
But an honest man's aboon his might, 

Guid faith he mauna fa' that ! 
For a' that, and a' that, 

Their dignities, and a' that, 
The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth, 
Are higher ranks than a' that." 

He concludes by expressing his belief that the day is 
at hand, when men of all lands will be brothers, and sense 
and worth hold universal dominion : a sentiment as likely 
to come to pass as that of the Spencean reformist, who says 
he desires no more than that all men shall be honest, and 
all women virtuous. 



WALLACE TOWER, AYR. 



" The dreary dungeon clock had numbered two, 
And Wallace Tower had sworn the fact was true." 



Were William AVallace and Robert Burns to return 
to earth and visit Ayr, a town which they loved, the hero 
would not know the tower in which he was imprisoned, 
nor the poet the structure of which he sang. The villa- 
nous clutch of restoration, as Fuseli said of retouched 
pictures, has been laid upon it, and instead of the square 
and solid tower of the days of John Baliol, we have a 
stately, recessed, and pinnacled substitute, rising high in 
the air, and emblazoned in the mixed manner of the 
middle ages. The new tower is indeed far more hand- 
some to look upon than the old ; but modern splendor is 
sometimes ill exchano^ed for even mouldering and totter- 
ing things ; we have got a structure which must depend 
upon its own merits ; the historic and poetic halo which 
enabled us to see Wallace, and Bruce, and Burns, and 
rendered the rough, rude, coarse features of the old peel 
interesting, is gone now and for ever. Their memory, in- 
deed, like an ill-laid ghost, continues to haunt the spot 
and this must supply the place of reality — the spell of the 
unimaginative : the bell to which the Poet alludes, is all 
that is old in the edifice. 

" Wallace Tower stands," says an authority, the beauty 
of whose account lies in the measurements, ** within a 
hundred yards of the river Ayr to the west, on the left 



316 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

side of the street that leads winding frqm the Cross of- Ayr, 
and which terminates in two roads, the one to Cumnock, 
and the other to the old bridge over the Doon to Carrick. 
This tower, according to tradition, derives its name from 
William Wallace, commonly called Sir William Wallace, 
who is celebrated in the history of Scotland, and of whom 
Thomson justly says, 

' Great patriot hero, ill-requited chief.' " 

Bums loved to walk and muse in places consecrated by 
the footsteps of Wallace : while he walked the streets of 
Ayr, he imagined that he trod the pavement where, in 
the dawn of youth, the hero slew the Buckler-Player : he 
traced, in imagination, the site of the celebrated Barns, 
where, stern in retributive justice, Wallace destroyed the 
inhuman murderers of his kindred and friends ; and he 
loved to wander on Sundays in Leglen wood, and visit 
Cartland Craigs, where Wallace often sought refuge from 
the southron : these, he regarded as sacred places ; but 
the poet might have remembered, that with Wallace 
Tower one of the most moving incidents in the hero's life 
is associated. When very young, W^allace was on a visit 
to Ayr: an English garrison occupied the castle, and, 
commanded by Lord Percy, controlled the land at will : 
he beheld this with no kindly feeling, and slew the mili- 
tary purveyor, who was acting the oppressor in a matter 
of marketing ; the soldiers flew to arms, and though he 
killed several, they bore him down with spears, thrust him 
into the tower, afterwards known by his name, and sen- 
tenced him to be starved to death. When that cruel doom 
was to all appearance fulfilled — for he was kej^t without 
food or drink till nature gave way — he was cast forth for 
dead, and the English gathered about the body, and said, 
" So this is the Wallace, who is to rescue Scotland thrice !" 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 317 

But God, to whom he prayed in his sad extremity, had 
not forsaken him : his nurse begged leave to bury his 
body, and, on taking him home, discovered signs of life. 

" His heart was wight, and flichtered to and fro." 

She placed him in a w^arm bed, fed him vv^ith milk from the 
warm breast of her daughter, and in a day or two he re- 
vived. At this time, Thomas the Rhymer visited Ayr, and 
an English priest taunted him with false prophecy. " This 
Wallace of yours," said he, " who was to do such glorious 
actions on English crests, is dead and gone — I saw his 
body cast out to the dogs." *' Am I dead V inquired the 
Prophet ; " I tell thee, priest, ere Wallace dies, he will 
send many thousands of thy tyrannic countrymen to a 
bloody grave !" This boast, it is like, caused the hero to 
set off before he was quite recovered, to Richardtown, 
the residence of his cousin, Adam Wallace. This was at 
night : he was met by the captain of Langcastle, with two 
of his men. " Scot, thou art a spy," said the southron : 
and attempted to seize him. Wallace replied meekly, 
" I am ill, for God's love let me alone ;" but as he spoke, 
he snatched out a rusty sword from his cloak, and struck 
his adversary with an energy which imprisonment seems 
not to have impaired ; for he cleft his neck bone in two ; 
by a couple of similar blows bestowed on the captain's 
followers, he obtained horses, arms, and money, and 
escaped with joy to his relations. 

The town of Ayr is prosperous and elegant. The 
visiters of the Land of Burns — they are from all countries 
— are said to leave it with the eulogium of the Poet on 
their lips : 

" Auld Ayr, which ne'er a town surpasses, 

For honest men and bonnie lasses." 
27* 



SCOTS, WHA HAE WI' WALLACE BLED. 



" Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, 
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led : 
Welcome to your gory bed, 
Or to ^ictorie." 



^ This martial ode was conceived and composed, accord- 
ing to the relation of Syme, in the midst of a storm, on 
the wilds of Kenmore, in Galloway. Syme was the 
companion of the Poet, at the time of which he speaks ; 
but his statement is at variance with the direct assertion 
of Burns himself, who says, that it was composed in an 
evening walJc, on the banks of the Nith, when warmed 
into a pitch of enthusiasm about liberty and independence. 
The storm at Kenmore was in the July of 1793 ; the 
yesternight's evening walk to which the Poet alludes 
was in the September of the same year. 

The air to which this song was written, is " Hey, tuttie 
taitie." — " I am delighted," the Poet writes, " with many 
little melodies, which the learned musician despises as 
silly and insipid. I do not know whether the old air 
'Hey, tuttie taitie,' may rank among this number; but 
well I know that with Eraser's hautboy it has often filled 
my eyes with tears. There is a ti-adition, which I have 
met with in many places of Scotland, that it was Robert 
Bruce's march at the battle of Bannockburn." The 
tradition had much to do in giving force to the manly 
address to his men, which the Poet put into the mouth of 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 319 

Bruce, on the glorious struggle for freedom on that 
memorable day. 

In August, 1787, Burns paid a visit to the famous field 
of Bannockbum, and in his loose memoranda recorded 
the feelings which the place awakened. " Came on to 
Bannockbum. Shown the old house, where James III. 
finished so tragically his unfortunate life. The field of 
Bannockbum : the hole in the stone where glorious 
Bruce set his standard. Here no Scot can pass uninte- 
rested. I fancy to myself, that I see my gallant heroic 
countrymen coming o'er the hill,' and down upon the 
plunderers of their country, and the murderers of their 
fathers : noble revenge and just hate glowing in every 
vein, striding more and more eagerly as they approach 
the oppressive, insulting, blood-thirsty foe ! I see them 
meet in gloriously-triumphant congratulation on the 
victorious field, exulting in their heroic leader, and res- 
cued liberty and independence." " This morning," he 
writes to his friend Muir, from Stirling, 26 August, 1787, 
— " I knelt at the tomb of Sir John the Graham, the 
gallant friend of the immortal Wallace ; and two hours 
ago I said a fervent prayer for old Caledonia, over the 
hole in a blue whinstone, where Robert de Bruce fixed 
his royal standard on the banks of Bannockbum." An 
ode such as this was to be expected from the enthusiasm 
which the place gave rise to, and the feeling w^hich the 
air awakened, when played on Fraser's hautboy — Bums 
seldom wrote but when roused by extraordinary emotions. 

The last stanza of the song is perhaps the most 
popular : — 

^ " Lay the proud usurpers low ! 

Tyrants fall in every foe ! 
Liberty's in every blow ! — 
Let us do or die ! " 



320 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

but the sentiment is borrowed, as the Poet indeed admits, 
from the common stall edition of the Minstrel's Wallace. 

" A false usurper sinks in every foe, 
And Hberty returns with every blow : " 

a couplet, he adds, worthy of Homer. 

What Burns thought of the address himself, is yet to 
be told — " I mentioned to you a S^ots ode or song I had 
lately composed," he writes to an anonymous correspon- 
dent, " and which I think has some merit. Allow me to 
enclose it." To Captain Miller he says, — "I really 
think the piece is in my best manner ; " but to Lord 
Buchan he offers no opinion : " Will your lordship," he 
writes, " allow me to present you with the enclosed little 
composition of mine, as a small tribute of gratitude 
for the acquaintance with which you have pleased 
to honor me 1 Independent of my enthusiasm as a 
Scotsman, I have rarely met with anything in history, 
which interests ftiy feelings as a man, equal with the story 
of Bannockburn. On the one hand, a cruel but able 
usurper, leading on the finest army in Europe, to ex- 
tinguish the last spark of freedom among a greatly daring 
and gi'eatly injured people ; on the other hand, the des- 
perate relics of a gallant nation, devoting themselves to 
rescue their bleeding country, or perish with her." Bruce 
and his men have lately found another Scottish minstrel, 
equal to the task of singing their deeds on the field of 
Bannockburn. 



THE TWEED: COLDSTREAM BRIDGE. 



' Yarrow and Tweed to mony a tune 
Owre Scotland rings." 



When Burns, in May, 1787, visited the chief scenes on 
the Scottish Border, onreaching Coldstream he wrote in his 
memorandum book, "Coldstream — went over to Eng- 
land — glorious river Tweed — clear and majestic." To 
those words, few but beautiful, a deeper and more pointed 
meaning was given by Robert Ainslie, of Berryvvell, the 
companion of his tour. " As soon," said he, " as the 
Poet reached the English side of the stream, he knelt 
dowm, and with extreme emotion, and a countenance rapt 
and inspired, prayed for Scotland, repeating aloud these 
lines of his Cotter's Saturday Night : 

" O Scotia ! my dear, my native soil, 

For whom my warmest wish to heaven is sent; 
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil 

Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content : 
And oh may Heaven their simple lives prevent 

From luxury 's contagion, weak and vile ! 
Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent, 
A virtuous populace may rise the while. 
And stand a wall of fire around their much-loved isle." 

Coldstream is a thriving and beautiful little town, and 
the parish in which it stands is cultivated like a garden : 
the Tweed, clear, deep, and broad, flows close to the 
place, commencing four miles higher, at Carham, its 
separation of England from Scotland, and presenting on 
both sides romantic and shady walks for those who love to 



322 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

meditate and muse. The town is undefiled by manufac- 
tures : here are old ruins, warlike and devotional, to exer- 
cise the conjectures of the antiquary : here the historian 
may contemplate the ford in the river, through which, in 
other days, the English made their military inroads, and 
were driven 

" Travel-soiled and weather-beaten back ; — " 

and by which the Scots often penetrated, spear in hand, 
to the gates of Durham and York : nor is it unimportant 
to say, that he may do all this, and stand on the handsome 
bridge which, like the union of which it is a type, joins 
in peace and love the once hostile nations. Here too 
General Monk raised that celebrated regiment, the Cold- 
stream guards, and watched the doings of Parliament, as 
well as the movements of his rival. General Lambert ; 
and more than all, here stands the private temple, and 
here dwells the priest, to whom all impetuous lovers 
hasten from the cruelty of parents, or the reluctant delay 
of a scrupulous church, and are satisfactorily united in 
what ancients and moderns call " the bonds of Hymen." 
All around, but more particularly on the Scottish side 
of the Bridge, are places well known in tale and history. 
Where Swinton House now stands, there was once a 
castle of great antiquity, the stronghold of the gallant 
family of Swinton, one of whose chiefs slew, in the 
battle-front, the Duke of Clarence, brother to Henry the 
Fifth ; and from one of whose daughters, the illustrious 
Sir Walter Scott, of Abbotsford, claimed descent. Here 
is shown the field of Hollywell Haugh, where Edward 
the First met the nobility of Scotland, on the death of the 
Fair Maiden of Norway, and as insolently as unjustly 
claimed the right of lord paramount over a free nation. 



THE LAND OP BURNS. 323 

Literature too has its claims : less than a mile from Cold- 
stream stands Lennel-House, lately the residence of 
Patrick Brydone, author of the Travels in Sicily and 
Malta ; and the district gave birth to Alexander Hume, a 
poet of high powers, who sings very sweetly as well as 
truly of his parent stream. 

" How mony happy hearts ye make, how mony mou's ye feed, 
The very weanies, lisping, pray for blessings on ye, Tweed." 

It is, in truth, Poetry which sheds enduring glory on a 
land. But for the bards of Greece, her memory would 
have only been a name and a few broken stones ; but for 
the authors of Home, what should we have known of the 
proud flight of her eagles. Virgil's verse, and Homer's 
song, have long outlived their native empires. What 
those mighty poets did for their countries of old. Burns 
and Scott have done of late for Scotland : the whole 
kingdom, highland and lowland, is brightened with 
romance and vocal with song : the genius of Scott has 
driven a railroad through the terra incognita of the North, 
and shown, instead of a wild race dwelling among rocks 
and heather, and hostile to all who had not the taste to 
wear tartan, a highly chivalrous people, and a highly 
romantic land. Before Burns arose in the West, we only 
knew that Coila was a clever dairy-maid, who excelled in 
butter and cheese ; we knew not, till he proved it, that 
her vales were lovely, and her maidens beautiful. 

" Nae poet thought her worth his while, 
To set her name in measured stile; 
She lay like some unkenned-of isle 
Beside New Holland." 

The breath of the Muse removed the cloud, as the sun 
dispels the mist ; and Ayrshire in all its beauty was made 
known to the rest of the world. 



THE LASS OF BALLOCHMYLE. 



" With careless step I onward strayed, 
My heart rejoiced in nature's joy ; 
When, musing in a lonely glade, 
A maiden fair I chanced to spy." 



Along the right or north bank of the Ayr, near the 
small village of Catrine, and about two miles from the 
residence of Burns at Mossgiel, lie the beautiful Braes of 
Ballochmyle. " The whole course of the Ayr," says 
Cume, " is fine ; but the banks of that river, as it bends 
to the eastward above Mauchline, are singularly beautiful." 
When the Poet was a boy, the house and estate of Bal- 
lochmyle were the property of Sir John Whitefoord, the 
nephew of Oliver Goldsmith's Caleb Whitefoord, 

" That compound of oddity, frolic, and fun," 

and the Papirius Cursor of many a curious newspaper 
column. The Whitefoords were of old standing in Ayr- 
shire, and generally respected ; but on the decline of 
their fortunes, their fine property passed from their hands 
into those of Claud Alexander, Esq. a gentleman who 
had returned to his native country, from a long and pros- 
perous residence in India. The farewell of the AVhite- 
foords to the home of their ancestors was commemorated 
by Burns in a song, not one of the happiest of his effusions. 

" Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr, 
Farewell the braes of Ballochmyle." 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 325 

The Whitefoords were the friends of the Bard : with the 
Alexanders he had yet to get acquainted ; and this he 
seems to have sought in a poetic way. 

The Braes of Ballochmyle was one of Burns's favorite 
haunts ; it was Hterally his musing ground : happening 
to meet, one fine evening of July, with Miss Wilhelmina 
Alexander, the sister of the new proprietor, then very 
young, and, it is said, very beautiful, he was so much 
struck with her charms, that he recorded them in the song 
of the Lass of Ballochmyle, a production elegant, and 
sweet, and impassioned. He had recently published the 
Kilmarnock edition of his Poems, and his name was so 
well known in the district by the month of November, 
that he thought he might inform the lady of the strain she 
had inspired. He accordingly wrote it out in a fair hand, 
and enclosing it in a rather elaborate letter, sent it to Miss 
Alexander. He was on the wing for Jamaica — for^ he 
says, " some ill-advised person had uncoupled the merci- 
less pack of the law at my heels." This was his expiring 
effort to obtain the notice of the rich of his native land. 

The letter contains much of the man, and relates the 
circumstances under which the Song was composed. 
** Poets," he says, " are such outre beings, so much the 
children of wayward fancy and capricious whim, that I 
believe the world generally allows them a larger latitude 
in the laws of propriety than the sober sons of judgment 
and prudence. 1 mention this as an apology for all the 
liberties that a nameless stranger has taken with you, in 
the enclosed poem, which he begs leave to present you 
with. The scenery was nearly taken from real life : 
though I dare say, madam, you do not recollect, as I 
believe you scarcely noticed, the poetic reveur as he wan- 
dered by you. I had roved out, as chance directed, in 
28 



326 THE LAND OF BURNS. 

the favorite haunts of my muse, on the banks of the Ayr, 
to view nature in all the gayety of the vernal year. The 
evening sun was flaming over the distant western hills : 
not a breath stirred the crimson opening blossom, nor the 
verdant spreading leaf. It was a golden moment for a 
poetic heart. Such was the scene, and such the hour, 
when in a corner of my prospect, I spied one of the fair- 
est pieces of Nature's workmanship that ever crowned a 
poetic landscape, or met a poet's eye. Had Calumny 
and Villainy taken my walk, they had at a moment sworn 
eternal peace with such an object." The song is con- 
ceived in a free style, and in a strain of luxurious, some 
have added, presumptuous, fervor. 

The bonnie Lass of Ballochmyle, however, noticed 
neither song nor letter ; and Burns resented her silence, 
it is said, with some bitterness : indeed in the book into 
which he copied both, he complains that they were unhon- 
ored with any notice. Currie and Lockhart have defended . 
the propriety of the lady's conduct, as chivalrous gentle- 
men should ; but they lay too much stress on the little 
that was known of Burns — and that little, evil — when 
he wrote his letter : surely they must have forgot that the 
Poet was then no unknown person, for his poems were 
before the world, and he was the correspondent of Mrs. 
Stewart of Stair, and others of equal name. The impres- 
sion which Miss Alexander's neglect made on the mind 
of Burns was long uneffaced ; when his friend Mrs. 
Dunlop, to whom he complained, excused the conduct 
of the Lass of Ballochmyle, he bitterly answered, " Had a 
half-witling Lord written the poem. Madam, would she 
have left it unanswered V But Miss Alexander has lived 
to make some reparation ; she has treasured up the letter, 
and its precious enclosure, and entrusts them in no hands 



THE LAND OF BURNS. 327 

save her own : she points out to the admirers of Burns 
the spot among the Braes where the Poet met her, and 
shows them a Httle rustic temple or grotto, commemora- 
tive of the subject, the song, and the Author. 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 



NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED IN THIS COUNTRY. 



I. 

TO MR. JOHN KENNEDY, 

DUMFRIES HOUSE. 



[Who the John Kennedy was to whom Burns addressed this note 
enclosing " The Cotter's Saturday Night," it is now, perhaps, vain 
to inquire : the Kennedy to whom Mr. Cobbett introduces us was a 
Thomas — perhaps a relation.] 



Mossgiel, 3rd March, 1786. 
Sir, 

I HAVE done myself the pleasure of complying with 

your request in sending you my Cottager. — If you have 

a leisure minute, I should be glad you would copy it, and 

return me either the original or the transcript, as I have 

not a copy of it by me, and I have a friend who wishes 

to see it. 

" Now, Kennedy, if foot or horse," * 

ROBT. BURNESS. 



* Poem LXXV. 

28* 



330 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

II. 

TO MR. AIKEN. 



[Robert Aiken, the gentleman to whom the " Cotter's Saturday 
Night" is inscribed, is also introduced in the "Brigs of Ayr." 
This is the last letter to which Burns seems to have subscribed his 
name in the spelling of his ancestors.] 



Mossgielj 3rd April, 1786. 
Dear Sir, 

I received your kind letter with double pleasure, on 
account of the second flattering instance of Mrs. C.'s 
notice and approbation, I assure you I 

" Turn out the burnt side o' my shin," 

as the famous Ramsay, of jingling memory, says, at such 
a patroness. Present her my most grateful acknowledg- 
ment in your very best manner of telling truth. I have 
inscribed the following stanza on the blank leaf of Miss 
More's Work : — * 

My proposals for publishing I am just going to send to 
press. I expect to hear from you the first opportunity. 

1 am ever, dear sir. 

Yours, 

RoBT. Burness. 



* See Poem LXXVIII. 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 331 



III. 

TO MR. JOHN KENNEDY. 



[" The small piece," the very last of his productions, which the 
poet enclosed in this letter, was " The Mountain Daisy," called in 
the manuscript more properly " The Gowan."] 



Mossgiel, 20th April, 1786. 

Sir, 

By some neglect in Mr. Hamilton, I did not hear of 
your kind request for a subscription paper 'till this day. 
I will not attempt any acknowledgment for this, nor the 
manner in which I see your name in Mr. Hamilton's 
subscription list. Allow me only to say, Sir, I feel the 
weight of the debt. 

I have here likewise inclosed a small piece, the very 
latest of my productions. I am a good deal pleased with 
some sentiments myself, as they are j ust the native queru- 
lous feelings of a heart, which, as the elegantly melting 
Gray says, " melancholy has marked for her own." 

Our race comes on a-pace ; that much-expected scene 
of revelry and mirth ; but to me it brings no joy equal to 
that meeting with which your last flattered the expecta- 
tion of. 

Sir, 

Your indebted humble servant, 

R. B. 



332 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

IV. 

TO MR. JOHN KENNEDY. 



[Burns was busy in a two-fold sense at present ; he was seeking 
patrons in every quarter for his contemplated volume, and he was 
composing for it some of his most exquisite poetry,] 



Mossgiel, im May, 1786. 
Dear Sir, 

I HAVE sent you the above hasty copy as I promised. 
In about three or four weeks I shall probably set the 
press a-going. I am much hurried at present, otherwise 
your diligence, so very friendly in my subscription, should 
have a more lengthened acknowledgment from. 

Dear Sir, 
Your obliged Servant, 

R. B. 



V. 
TO MR. JOHN KENNEDY. 



[It is a curious chapter in the life of Burns to count the number of 
letters which he wrote, the number of fine poems he composed, and 
the number of places which he visited in the unhappy summer and 
autumn of 1786.] 

Kilmarnock, August, 1786. 
My Dear Sir, 

Your truly facetious epistle of the 3rd inst. gave me 
much entertainment. I was sorry I had not the pleasure 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 333 

of seeing you as I passed your way, but we shall bring up 
all our lee way on Wednesday, the 16th current, when I 
hope to have it in my power to call on you and take a 
kind, very probably a last adieu, before I go for Jamaica; 
and I expect orders to repair to Greenock every day. — 
I have at last made my public appearance, and am 
solemnly inaugurated into the numerous class. — Could I 
have got a carrier, you should have had a score of 
vouchers for my authorship ; but now you have them, let 
them speak for themselves. — 

Farewell, my dear friend ! may guid luck hit you, 
And 'mangher favorites admit you ! 
If e'er Detraction shore to smit you, 

May nane believe him ! 
And ony de'il that thinks to get you. 

Good Lord deceive him. 
R. E. 



VI. 
TO MR. JAMES BURNESS, 

MONTROSE. 



[The good and generous James Burness, of Montrose, was ever 
ready to rejoice with his cousin's success or sympathize with his 
sorrows, but he did not like the change which came over the old 
northern surname of Burness, when the bard modified it into Burns : 
the name, now a rising one in India, is spelt Burnes.] 



Alossgiel, Tuesday noon, Sept. 26, 1786. 
My Dear Sir, 

I THIS moment receive yours — receive it with the 



334 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

honest hospitable warmth of a friend's welcome. What- 
ever comes from you wakens always up the better blood 
about my heart, which your kind little recollections of 
my parental friends carries as far as it will go. 'Tis 
there that man is blest. 'Tis there, my friend, man feels 
a consciousness of something within him above the 
trodden clod ! The grateful reverence to the hoary 
(earthly) author of his being — the burning glow when 
he clasps the woman of his soul to his bosom — the tender 
yearnings of heart for the little angels to whom he has 
given existence — these nature has poured in milky streams 
about the human heart ; and the man who never rouses 
them to action, by the inspiring influences of their proper 
objects, loses by far the most pleasurable part of his exist- 
ence. 

My departure is uncertain, but I do not think it will be 
till after harvest. I will be on very short allowance of 
time indeed, if I do not comply with your friendly invi- 
tation. When it will be I don't know, but if I can make 
my wish good, I will endeavor to drop you a line some 

time before. My best compliments to Mrs. ; I 

should [be] equally mortified should I drop in when she is 
abroad, but of that I suppose there is little chance. 

What I have wrote heaven knows ; I have not time to 
review it ; so accept of it in the beaten way of friendship. 
With the ordinary phrase — perhaps rather more than the 
ordinary sincerity, 

I am, dear Sir- 



Ever yours, 

R. B. 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 335 

VII. 

TO DR. ARCHIBALD LAURIE. 

Mossgiel, Idth Nov. 1786. 
Dear Sir, 

I HAVE along with this sent the two volumes of Ossian, 
with the remaining volume of the Songs. Ossian I am not 
in such a hurry about ; but I wish the songs with the 
volume of the Scotch Poets returned as soon as they can 
conveniently be despatched. If they are left at Mr. Wil- 
son, the bookseller's shop, Kilmarnock, they will easily 
reach me. 

My most respectful compliments to Mr. and Mrs. Laurie ; 
and a Poet's warmest wishes for their happiness to the 
young ladies ; particularly the fair musician, whom I 
think much better qualified than ever David was, or could 
be, to charm an evil spirit out of a Saul. 

Indeed, it needs not the feelings of a poet to be inte- 
rested in the welfare of one of the sweetest scenes of 
domestic peace and kindred love that ever I saw ; as I 
think the peaceful unity of St. Margaret's Hill can only 
be excelled by the harmonious concord of the Apocalyptic 
Zion. 

I am, dear Sir, yours sincerely, 

Robert Burns. 



VIII. 
TO MR. GAVIN HAMILTON. 



[This letter was first published by Robert Chambers, who consi- 
dered it as closing the inquiry, " was Burns a married man T' No 



336 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

doubt Burns thought himself unmarried, and the Rev. Mr. Auld was 
of the same opinion, since he offered him a certificate that he was 
single : but no opinion of either priest or lawyer, including the dis- 
clamation of Jean Armour, and thebelief of Burns, could have, in my 
opinion, barred the claim of the children to full legitimacy, according 
to the law of Scotland.] 



Edinburgh, Jan. 7, 1787. 

To tell the truth among friends, I feel a miserable blank 
in my heart, with the want of her, and I don't think I 
shall ever meet with so delicious an armful again. She 
has her faults ; and so have you and I ; and so has every 
body; 

Their ti'icks and craft hae put me daft ; 

They've ta'en me in and a' that; 
But clear your decks, and here's the sex, 
I like the jads for a' that. 
For a' that and a' that, 
And twice as muckle's a' that. 



I have met with a very pretty girl, a Lothian farmer's 
daughter, whom I have almost persuaded to accompany 
me to the west country, should I ever retjirn to settle 
there. By the bye, a Lothian farmer is about an Ayrshire 
squire of the lower kind ; and I had a most delicious ride 
from Leith to her house yesternight, in a hackney-coach, 
with her brother and two sisters, and brother's wife. We 
had dined all together at a common friend's house in Leith, 
and danced, drank, and sang till late enough. The night 
was dark, the claret had been good, and I thirsty. * * * 

R. B. 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 337 

IX. 

TO MR. SIBBALD, 

BOOKSELLER IN EDINBURGH. 



[This letter first appeared in that very valuable work, Nicholl's 
Illustrations of Literatjjtre.] 



Sir, 



Laiun Market. 



So little am I acquainted with the words and manners 
of the more public and polished walks of life, that I often 
feel myself much embarrassed how to express the feel- 
ings of my heart, particularly gratitude : 

" Rude am I in my speech, 
And little therefore shall I grace my cause 
In speaking for myself— " 

The warmth with which your have befriended an 
obscure man and a young author in the last three maga- 
zines—I can only say, Sir, I feel the weight of the 
obligation ; I wish I could express my sen$e of it. In 
the meantime accept of the conscious acknowledgment 
from, 

^ Sir, 

Your obliged servant, 

R. B. 



X. 
TO THE EARL OF GLENCAIRN. 



[The poet addressed the following letter to the Earl of Glencairn 
when he commenced his journey to the Border. It was first printed 
29 



338 - ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

in the third edition of Lockhart's Life of Burns ; an eloquent and 
manly work.] 

My Lord, 

I GO away to-morrow morning early, and allow me to 
vent the fulness of my heart, in thanking your lordship 
for all that patronage, that benevolence and that friend- 
ship, with which you have honored me. With brimful 
eyes, I pray that you may find in that great Being, whose 
image you so nobly bear, that friend which I have found 
in you. My gratitude is not selfish design — that I dis- 
dain — it is not dodging after the heels of greatness — 
that is an offering you disdain. It is a feeling of the same 
kind with my devotion. 

^ KB. 



XI. 
TO MR. WILLIAM DUNBAR. 



[ William Dunbar, Colonel of the Crochallan Fencibles, The name 
has a martial sound, but the corps which he commanded was a club 
of wits, whose courage was exercised on *' paitricks, teals, moor-powts, 
and plovers."] 

Lawn-market, Monday morning. 
Dear Sir, 

In justice to Spenser, I must acknowledge that there is 
scarcely a poet in the language could have been a more 
agreeable present to me ; and in justice to you, allow 
me to say, Sir, that I have not met with a man in Edin- 
burgh to whom I would so willingly have been indebted 
for the gift. The tattered rhymes I herewith present 
you, and the handsome volumes of Spenser for which I 
am so much indebted to your goodness, may perhaps be 



OKKilNAL LETTERS. 339 

not in proportion to one another ; but be that as it may, 
my gift, though far less valuable, is as sincere a mark of 
esteem as yours. 

The time is approaching when I shall return to my 
shades ; and I am afraid my numerous Edinburgh friend- 
ships are of so tender a construction, that they will not 
bear carriage with me. Yours is one of the few that I 
could wish of a more robust constitution. It is indeed 
very probable that when I leave this city, we part never 
more to meet in this sublunary sphere ; but I have a 
strong fancy that in some future eccentric planet, the 
comet of happier systems than any with which astronomy 
is yet acquainted, you and I, among the harum scarum 
sons of imagination and whim, with a hearty shake of a 
hand, a metaphor and a laugh, shall recognise old ac- 
quaintance : 

" Where wit may sparkle all its rays, 
Uncurst with caution's fears ; 
That pleasure basking in the blaze, 
Rejoice for endless years." 

I have the honor to be, with the warmest sincerity, dear 

sir, &c. 

R.B. 



XII. 
TO JAMES JOHNSON. 



[James Johnson was an engraver in Edinburgh, and proprietor of 
the Musical Museum ; a truly national work, for which Burns wrote 
or amended many songs.] 

Laion-niarket, Friday noon, 3 May, 1787. 
Dear Sir, 

I HAVE sent you a song never before known, for your 



340 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

collection ; the air by M'Gibbon, but I know not the 
author of the words, as I got it from Dr. Blacklock. 

Farewell, my dear sir ! I wished to have seen you, 
but I have been dreadfully throng, as I march to-morrow. 
Had my acquaintance with you been a little older, I 
would have asked the favor of your correspondence, as I 
have met with few people whose company and conversa- 
tion gives me so much pleasure, because I have met 
with few whose sentiments are so congenial to my own. 

When Dunbar and you meet, tell him that I left Edin- 
burgh with the idea of him hanging somewhere about my 
heart. 

Keep the original of the song till we meet again, when- 
ever that may be. 

R. B, 



XIII. 
TO MR. PATISON, 

BOOKSELLER, PAISLEY 



[This letter has a business air about it: the name of Patison is 
nowhere else to be found in the poet's correspondence.] 



Berry-well, near Dunse, Maij llth, 1787. 
Dear Sir, 

I AM sorry I was out of Edinburgh, making a slight 
pilgrimage to the classic scenes of this country, when I 
was favored with yours of the 11th instant, enclosing an 
order of the Paisley banking company on the royal bank, 
for twenty-two pounds seven shillings sterling, payment 
in full, after carriage deducted, for ninety copies of my 
book I sent you. According to your motions, I see you 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 341 

will have left Scotland before this reaches you, otherwise 
I would send you " Holy Willie" with all my heart. I 
was so hurried that I absolutely forgot several things I 
ought to have minded, among the rest, sending books to 
Mr. Cowan : but any order of yours will be answered at 
Creech's shop. You will please remember that non-sabscri- 
berspay six shillings, this is Creech's profit ; but those who 
have subscribed, though their names have been neglected 
in the printed list, which is very incorrect, are supplied at 
subscription price. I was not at G-lasgow, nor do I intend 
for London ; and I think Mrs. Fame is very idle to tell so 
many lies on a poor poet. When you or Mr. Cowan 
write for copies, if you should want any, direct to Mr. Hill, 
at Mr. Creech's shop ; and I write to Mr. Hill by this post, 
to answer either of your orders. Hill is Mr. Creech's 
first clerk, and Creech himself is presently in London. 
I suppose I shall have the pleasure, against your return 
to Paisley, of assuring you how much I am, dear sir, 
your obliged humble servant. 



XIV. 
TO MR. JAMES SMITH, 

AT MILLER AND SMITH's OFFICE, LINLITHGOW. 



[Burns, it seems by this letter, had still a belief that he would be 
obliged to try his fortune in the West Indies: he soon saw how hol- 
low all the hopes were, which had been formed by his friends of 
" pension, post or place," in his native land.] 

Mauchline^ Wth June^ 1787. 

My EVER DEAR SiR, 

I DATE this from Mauchline, where I arrived on Friday 
29* 



342 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

even last. I slept at John Dow's, and called for my 
daughter. Mr. Hamilton and family ; your mother, sister, 
and brother ; my quondam Eliza, &c., all well. If any 
thing had been wanting to disgust me completely at 
Armour's family, their mean, servile compliance would 
have done it. 

Give me a spirit like my favorite hero, Milton's Satan : 

Hail, horrors ! hail, 
Infernal world ! and thou profoundest hell, 
Receive thy new possessor ! he who brings 
A mind not to be chang'd by place or time ! 

I cannot settle to my mind. — Farming, the only thing 
of which I know any thing, and heaven above knows, 
but little do I understand of that, I cannot, dare not risk 
on farms as they are. If I do not fix, I will go for Jamai- 
ca. Should I stay in an unsettled state at home, I would 
only dissipate my little fortune, and ruin what I intend 
shall compensate my little ones for the stigma I have 
brought on their names. 

I shall write you more at large soon ; as this letter 
costs you no postage, if it be worth reading you cannot 
complain of your penny-worth. 

I am ever, my deai" Sir, 

Yours, 



R. B. 



P. S. The cloot has unfortunately broke, but I have 
provided a fine buffalo-horn, on which I am going to affix 
the same cypher which yoii will remember was on the lid 
of the cloot. 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 343 

XV. 

TO ROBERT AJNSLIE, Esq. 



[This letter, were proof wanting, shows the friendly and familiar 
footing on which Burns stood with the Ainslies, and more particularly 
with the author of that popular work, the " Reasons for the Hope 
that is in us."] 



Mauchline, 23rd July, 1787. 
My dear Ainslie, 

There is one thing for which I set great store by you 
as a friend, and it is this, that I have not a friend upon 
earth, besides yourself, to whom I can talk nonsense 
without forfeiting some degree of his esteem. Now, to 
one like me, who never cares for spep-king any thing else 
but nonsense, such a friend as you is an unvaluable ti'ea- 
sure. I was never a rogue, but have been a fool all 
my life ; and, in spite of all my endeavors, I see now 
plainly that I shall never be wise. Now it rejoices my 
heart to have met with such a fellow as you, who, though 
you are not just such a hopeless fool as I, yet I trust 
you will never listen so much to the temptations of the 
devil as to grow so very wise that you will in the least 
disrespect an honest fellow because he is a fool. In short, 
I have set you down as the staff of my old age, when the 
whole list of my friends will, after a decent share of pity, 
have forgot me. 

Though in the morn comes sturt and strife. 

Yet joy may come at noon ; 
And I hope to live a merry, merry life 

When a' thir days are done. 



344 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

Write me soon, were it but a few lines just to tell me 
how that good sagacious man your father is — that kind 
dainty body your mother — that strapping chiel your 
brother Douglas — and my friend Rachel, who is as far 
before Rachel of old, as she was before her blear-eyed 
sister Leah. 

R. B. 



XVI. 
TO ROBERT AINSLIE, Esq. 

BERRYWELL DUNSE, 



[This characteristic letter was first published by Sir Harris Nico- 
las ; others, still more characteristic, addi'essed to the same gentleman, 
are abroad; how they escaped from private keeping is a sort of 
riddle.] 

Edinburgh. 23rd August, 1787. 

" As I gaed up to Dunsie 
To warp a pickle yarn, 
Robin, silly body, 
He gat me wi' bairn." 

From henceforth, my dear sir, I am determined to set 
off with my letters like the periodical writers, viz., prefix 
a kind of text, quoted from some classic of undoubted 
authority, such as the author of the immortal piece, of 
which my text is a part. What I have to say on my text 
is exhausted in a letter which I wrote to you the other 
day, before I had the pleasure of receiving yours from 
Inverkeithing ; and sure never was any thing more lucky, 
as I have but the time to write this, that Mr. Nicol, on 
the opposite side of the table, takes to correct a proof- 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 345 

sheet of a thesis. They are gabbling Latin so loud that 
I cannot hear what my own soul is saying in my own 
skull, so I must just give you a matter-of-fact sentence or 
two, and end, if time permit, with a verse de rei genera- 
tione. To-morrow I leave Edinburgh in a chaise ; Nicol 
thinks it more comfortable than horse-back, to which I 
say, Amen ; so Jenny Geddes goes home to Ayrshire, 
to use a phrase of my mother's, wi' her finger in her 
mouth. 

Now for a modest verse of classical authority : 

The cats like kitchen ; 
The dogs like broo ; 
The lasses like the lads weel, 
And th' auld wives too. 

CHORUS. 

And we're a' noddin, 

Nid, nid, noddin, 
"We're a' noddin fou at e'en. 

If this does not please you, let me hear from you ; if 
you write any time before the 1st of September, direct 
to Inverness, to be left at the post-office till called for ; 
the next week at Aberdeen, the next at Edinburgh. 

The sheet is done, and I shall just conclude with 
assuring you that 

I ever am, and with pride shall be, 
My dear sir, &:c. 

R. B, 

Call the boy what you think proper, only interject 
Burns. What do you say to a Scripture name ? Zimri 
Burns Ainslie, or Architophel, &c. look your Bible for 
these two heroes, if you do this, I will repay the com- 
pliment. 



346 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

XVII. 

TO CHARLES HAY, Esq. 

ADVOCATE. 



[The verses enclosed were written on the death of the Lord Presi- 
dent Dundas, at the suggestion of Charles Hay, Esq. advocate, after- 
wards a judge, under the title of Lord Newton,] 



Sir,, 

The enclosed poem was written in consequence of your 
suggestion last time I bad the pleasure of seeing you. 
It cost rae an hour or two of next morning's sleep, but 
did not please me ; so it lay by, an ill-digested effort, till 
the other day that I gave it a critic brush. These kind 
of subjects are much hackneyed; and, besides the wailings 
of the rhyming tribe over the ashes of the great are 
cursedly suspicious, and out of all character for sincerity. 
These ideas damped my muse's fire ; however, I have 
done the best I could, and, at all events, it gives me an 
opportunity of declaring that I have the honor to be, sir, 
your obliged humble servant. 

KB. 



XVIII. 
TO MR. WILLIAM DUNBAR. 

EDINBURGH. 



[This letter was printed for the first time by Robert Chambers, in 
his " People's Edition" of Burns.] 

Mauchline, 1th April, 1788. 
I HAVE not delayed so long to write to you, my 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 347 

much respected friend, because I thought no farther of 
my promise. I have long since given up that kind of 
formal correspondence, where one sits down irksomely to 
write a letter, because we think we are in duty bound so 
to do. 

I have been roving over the country, as the farm I have 
taken is forty miles from this place, hiring servants and 
preparing matters ; but most of all, I am earnestly busy 
to bring about a revolution in my own mind. As, till 
within these eighteen months, I never was the wealthy 
master of ten guineas, my knowledge of business is to 
learn ; add to this, my late scenes of idleness and dissipa- 
tion have enervated my mind to an alarming degree. 
Skill in the sober science of life is my most serious and 
hourly study. I have dropt all conversation and all 
reading (prose reading) but what tends in some way or 
other to my serious aim. Except one worthy young 
fellow, I have not one single correspondent in Edinburgh. 
You have indeed kindly made me an offer of that kind. 
The world of wits, and gens comme il faut which I lately 
left, and with whom I never again will intimately mix — 
from that port, sir, I expect your Gazette : what les 
heaux esprits are saying, what they are doing, and what 
they are singing. Any sober intelligence from my seques- 
tered walks of life ; any droll original ; any passing 
remark, important forsooth, because it is mine ; any little 
poetic effort, however embryoth ; these, my dear sir, are 
all you have to expect from me. ' When I talk of poetic 
efforts, I must have it always understood, that I appeal 
from your wit and taste to your friendship and good na- 
ture. The first would be my favorite tribunal, where 
I defied censure; but the last, where I declined justice. 
I have scarcely made a single distich since I saw you. 



34S ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

"When I meet with an old Scots air that has any facetious 
idea in its name, I have a peculiar pleasure in following 
out that idea for a verse or two. 

I trust that this will find you in better health than I did 
last time I called for you. A few lines from you, 
directed to me at Mauchline, were it but to let me know 
how you are, will set my mind a good deal [at rest.] 
Now, never shun the idea of writing me because perhaps 
you may be out of humor or spirits. ^ I could give you a 
hundred good consequences attending a dull letter; one, 
for example, and the remaining ninety-nine some other 
time — it will always serve to keep in countenance, my 
much respected sir, your obliged friend and humble 
'Servant, 

R. B. 



XIX. 
TO MR. WILLIAM BURNS. 



[William Burns was the youngest brother of the poet. He was 
bred a Sadler : went to Longtown/and finally to London, where he 
died early.] 

Isle, March 25, 1789. 
I HAVE stolen from my corn-sowing this minute to 
write a line to accompany your shirt and hat, for I can 
no more. Your sister Maria arrived yesternight, and begs 
to be remembered to you. Write me every opportunity, 
never mind postage. My head, too, is as addle as an egg, 
this morning, with dining abroad yesterday, i received 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 349 

yours by the mason. Forgive me this fooHsh -looking 
scrawl of an epistle. 

1 am ever, 

My clear William, 

Yours, 

R. B. 

P.S. If you are not then gone from Longtown, I'll 
write you a long letter, by this clay se 'en-night. If you 
should not succeed in your tramps, don't be dejected, or 
take any rash step — return to us in that case, and we will 
court fortune's better humor. Remember this, I charge 
you. 

R. B. 



XX. 
TO MR. WILLIAM BURNS, 

SADDLER, 

CARE OF MR. WRIGHT, CARRIER, LONGTOWN. 



[" Never to despair" was a favorite saying with Burns : '' firm 
resolve," he held, with Young, to be "the column of true majesty in 
man."] 

Isle, Iba April, 1789. 
My DEAR William, 

I AM extremely sorry at the misfortune of your legs; 
I beg you will never let any worldly concern interfere 
with the more serious matter, the safety of your life and 
limbs. I have not time in these hurried days to write you 
any thing other than a mere how d'ye letter. J will 
only repeat my favorite c^uotation : — 
30 



350 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

" What proves the hero truly great 
Is never, never to despair." 

My house shall be your welcome home ; and as I know 
your prudence (would to God you had resolution equal to 
your lyrudence ! ) if anywhere at a distance from your 
friends, you should need money, you know my direction 
by post. 

The enclosed is from Gilbert, brought by your sister 
Nanny. It was unluckily forgot. Yours to Gilbert goes 
by post. — I heard from them yesterday, they are all well. 

Adieu, 

R. B. 



XXI. 

TO LADY W[1NIFRED] M[AXWELLJ 

CONSTABLE. 



[The Lady Winifred Maxwell, the last of the old line of Nithsdale, 
was grand-daughter of that Earl who, in 1715, made an almost 
miraculous escape from death, through the spirit and fortitude of his 
countess, a lady of the noble family of Powis.] 



My Lady, 

In vain have I from day to day expected to hear from 
Mrs. Young, as she promised me at Dalswinton that she 
would do me the honor to introduce me at Tinwald ; and 
it was impossible, not from your ladyship's accessibility, 
but from my own feelings, that I could go alone. Lately, 
indeed, Mr. Maxwell of Carruchen, in his usual goodness, 
offered to accompany me, \yhen an unlucky indisposition 
on my part hindered my embracing the opportunity. To 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 351 

court the notice or the tables of the great, except where I 
have sometimes had ahttle matter to ask of them, or more 
often the pleasanter task of witnessing my gratitude to them, 
is what I never have done, and I trust never shall do, 
But with your ladyship I have the honor to be connected 
by one of the strongest and most endearing ties in the 
whole mortal world. Common sufferers, in a cause 
where even to be unfortunate is glorious, the cause^ of 
heroic loyalty ! Though my fathers had not illustrious 
honors and vast properties to hazard in the contest, though 
they left their humble cottages only to add so many units 
more to the unnoted crowd that followed their leaders, 
yet what they could they did, and what they had they 
lost; with unshaken firmness and unconcealed political 
attachments, they shook hands with ruin for what they 
esteemed the cause of their king and their country. The 
language and the enclosed verses are for your ladyship's 
eye alone. Poets are not very famous for their prudence ; 
but as I can do nothing for a cause which is now nearly 
no moi'e, I do not wish to hurt myself. 

I have the honor to be, 
My lady. 
Your ladyship's obliged and obedient 

Humble servant, 

R. B. 



XXII. 
TO PROVOST MAXWELL, 

OF LOCHMABEN. 



[Of Lochmaben, the '' Marjory of the mony Lochs" of the election 
ballads, Maxwell was at this time provost, a post more of honor than 
oflabor.] 



352 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

Ellisland, 20th December^ 1787. 
Dear Provost, 

As my friend Mr. Graham goes for your good town 
to-morrow, I cannot resist the temptation to send you a 
few lines, and as I have nothing to say, I have chosen this 
sheet of foolscap, and begun as you see at the top of the 
first page, because I have ever observed, that when once 
people have fairly set out they know not where to stop. 
Now that my first sentence is concluded, I have nothing to 
do but to pray Heaven to help me on to another. Shall I 
write you on Politics or Religion, tw^o master subjects for 
your sayers of nothing. Of the first I dare say by this 
time you are nearly surfeited : and for the last, whatever 
they may talk of it, who make it a kind of company con- 
cern, I never could endure it beyond a soliloquy. I might 
write you on farming, on building, on marketing, but my 
poor distracted mind is so torn, so jaded, so racked and 
bediveled with the task of the superlative damned to make 
one guinea do the business of three, that I detest, abhor, 
and swoon at the very word business, though no less than 
four letters of my very short sirnarae are in it. 

Well, to make the matter short, I shall betake myself 
to a subject ever fruitful of themes ; a subject the turtle- 
feast of the sons of Satan, and the delicious secret sugar- 
plum of the babes of grace — a subject sparkling with all 
the jewels that wit can find in the mines of genius : and 
pregnant with all the stores of learning from Moses and 
Confucius to Franklin and Priestley — in short may it 
please your Lordship, I intend to write * * * 

{Here the Poet inserted a song lohich can only be sung at times lohen 
the punch-boivl has done its duty and wild loit is set free.] 

If at any time you expect a field-day in your town, a 
day when Dukes, Earls, and Knights pay their court to 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. S53 

weavers, tailors and cobblers, I should like to know of it 

two or three days beforehand. It is not that I care three 

skips of a cur dog for the politics, but I should like to see 

such an exhibition of human nature. If you meet with 

that worthy old veteran in religion and good-fellowship, 

Mr. Jeffrey, or any of his amiable family, I beg you will 

give them my best compliments. 

R. B. 



XXIII. 
TO ME. SUTHERLAND, 

PLAYER, 
ENCLOSING A PROLOGUE. 



[When the farm failed, the poet sought pleasure in the play-house : 
he tried to retire from his own harassing reflections, into a world 
created by other minds.] 



Mondo.y Morning. 
I WAS much disappointed, my dear sir, in wanting your 
most agreeable company yesterday. However, I heartily 
pray for good weather next Sunday ; and whatever aerial 
Being has the guidance of the elements, may take any 
other half-dozen of Sundays he pleases, and clothe them 

with 

" Vapors, and clouds, and storms, 
Until he terrify himself 
At combustion of his own raising." 

I shall see you on Wednesday forenoon. In the 
greatest hurry, 



R. B. 



30* 



354 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 



XXIV. 

TO WILLIAM DUNBAR, W. S. 



[This letter was first published by the Ettrick Shepherd, in his 
edition of Burns : it is remarkable for this sentence, " I am resolved 
never to breed up a son of mine to any of the learned professions : I 
know the value of independence, and since I cannot give my sons 
an independent fortune, I shall give them an independent line of life." 
We may look round us and inquire which line of life the poet could 
possibly mean.] 

Ellisland, liih January, 1790. 

Since we are here creatures of a day, since ** a few 
summer days and a few winter nights, and the life of man 
is at an end," why, ray dear much-esteeraed sir, should 
you and I let negligent indolence, for I know it is nothing 
worse, step in between us and bar the enjoyment of a 
mutual correspondence % We are not shapen out of the 
common, heavy, methodical clod, the elemental stuff of 
the plodding selfish lace, the sons of Arithmetic and 
Prudence : our feelings and hearts are not benumbed and 
poisoned by the cursed influence of riches, which, what- 
ever blessing they may be in other respects, are no friends 
to the nobler qualities of the heart : in the name of ran- 
dom sensibility, then, let never the moon change on our 
silence any more. I have had a tract of bad health 
most part of this winter, else you had heard from me 
long ere now. Thank Heaven, I am now got so much 
better as to be able to partake a little in the enjoyments 
of life. 

Our friend Cunningham will, perhaps, have told you of 
my going into the Excise. The truth is, I found it a very 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 355 

convenient business to have <^oO per annum, nor have I 
yet felt any of those mortifying circumstances in it that I 
was led to fear. 

Feb. 2. 

I have not, for sheer hurry of business, been able to 
spare five minutes to finish my letter. Besides my farm 
business, I ride on my Excise matters at least two hundred 
miles every week. I have not by any means given up 
the muses. You will see in the 3d vol. of Johnson's Scots 
songs that I have contributed my mite there. 

But, my dear sir, little ones that look up to you for 
paternal protection are an important charge. I have 
already two fine, healthy, stout little fellows, and I wish 
to throw some light upon them. I have a thousand reveries 
and schemes about them, and their future destiny. Not 
that I am a Utopian projector in these things. I am 
resolved never to breed ujd a son of mine to any of the 
learned professions. I know the value of independence ; 
and since I cannot give my sons an independent fortune, 
I shall give them an independent line of life. What a 
chaos of hurry, chance, and changes, is this world, when 
one sits soberly down to reflect on it ! To a father, who 
himself knows the world, the thought that he shall have 
sons to usher into it must fill him with dread ; but if he 
have daughters, the prospect in a thoughtful moment is 
apt to shock him. 

1 hope Mrs. Fordyce and the two young ladies are well. 
Do let me forget that they are nieces of yours, and let 
me say that I never saw a more interesting, sweeter pair 
of sisters in my life. I am the fool of my feelings and 
attachments. I oflen take up a volume of my Spenser 
to realize you to my imagination, and think over the social 
scenes we have had together. God grant that there may be 



356 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

another world more congenial to honest fellows beyond 
this. A world where these rubs and plagues of absence, 
distance, misfortunes, ill-health, &c., shall no more damp 
hilarity and divide friendship. This I know is your throng 
season, but half a page will much oblige. 
My dear sir. 

Yours sincerely. 

R. B. 



XXV. 
TO DR. ANDERSON. 



[The gentleman to whom this imperfect note is addressed was Dr. 
James Anderson, a well-known agricultural and miscellaneous 
writer, and the editor of a weekly miscellany called the Bee.] 



Sir, 

I AM much indebted to my worthy friend. Dr. Black- 
lock, for introducing me to a gentleman of Dr. Anderson's 
celebrity; but when you do me the honor to ask my 
assistance in your proposed publication, alas, sir ! you 
might as well think to cheapen a little honesty at the sign 
of an advocate's wig, or humility under the Geneva band. 
I am a miserable hurried devil, worn to the marrow in the 
friction of holding the noses of the poor publicans to the 
grindstone of the excise ! and, like Milton's Satan, for 
private reasons, am forced 

" To do what yet though damn'd I would abhor." 
— and, except a couplet or two of honest execration 

R. B. 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 357 

XXVI. 

TO WILLIAM TYTLER, ESQ, 

OF WOODHOUSELEE. 



[William Tytler was the " revered defender of the beauteous 
Stuart" — a man of genius and a gentleman.] 



Lawn Market^ August^ 1790. 
Sir, 

Enclosed I have sent yoa a sample of the old pieces 
that are still to be found among our peasantry in the 
west. I had once a great many of these fragments, and 
some of these here entire ; but as I had no idea then that 
any body cared for them, I have forgotten them. I inva- 
riably hold it sacrilege to add anything of my own to help 
out with the shattered wrecks of these venerable old 
compositions ; but they have many, various readings. If 
you have not seen these before, I know they will flatter 
your true old-style Caledonian feelings ; at any rate I am 
truly happy to have an opportunity of assuring you how 
sincerely I am, revered sir. 

Your gratefully indebted humble servant, 

R. B. 



XXVII. 
TO WILLIAM DUNBAR, W. S. 



[This letter was in answer to one from Dunbar, in which the witty 
colonel of the Crochallan Fencibles supposed the poet had been trans- 
lated to Elysium to sing to the immortals, as his voice had not been 
heard of late on earth. 1 



Ellisland, 11 th January^ 1791. 
I AM not gone to Elysium, most noble colonel, but am 



358 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

still here in this sublunary world, serving my God by pro- 
pagating his image, and honoring my king by begetting 
him loyal subjects. 

Many happy returns of the season await my friend. 
May the thorns of care never beset his path ! May peace 
be an inmate of his bosom, and rapture a frequent visiter 
of his soul ! May the blood-hounds of misfortune never 
track his steps, nor the screech-owl of sorrow alarm his 
dwelling ! May enjoyment tell thy hours, and pleasure 
number thy days, thou friend of the bard ! " Blessed be 
he that blesseth thee, and cursed be he that curseth 
thee!!!" 

As a farther proof that I am still in the land of exist- 
ence, I send you a poem, the latest I have composed. I 
have a particular reason for wishing you only to show it to 
select friends, should you think it worthy a friend's peru- 
sal ; but if, at your first leisure hour, you will favor me 
with your opinion of, and strictures on the performance, 
it will be an additional obligation on, dear sir, your deeply 

indebted humble servant, 

R. B. 



XXVIII. 
TO MRS. GRAHAM, 

OP FINTRY. 



[The following letter was written on the blank leaf of a new edition 
of his poems, presented by the poet to one whom he regarded, and 
justly, as a patroness.] 

It is probable, madam, that this page may be read, 
when the hand that now Avrites it shall be mouldering in 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 359 

the dust ; may it then bear witness, that I present you 
these volumes as a tribute of gratitude, on my part 
ardent and sincere, as your and Mr. Graham's goodness 
to me has been generous and noble ! May every child of 
yours, in the hour of need, find such a friend as I shall 
teach every child of mine, that their father found in you. 

R. B. 



XXIX. 

TO COLONEL FULLARTON, 

OF FULLARTON. 



[This letter was first published in the Edinburgh Chronicle.] 

EUisland, 1791. 
Sir, 

I HAVE just this minute got the fi-ank, and next minute 
must send it to j^ost, else I purposed to have sent you two 
or three other bagatelles, that might have amused a vacant 
hour about as well as *' Six excellent new songs," or, the 
Aberdeen " Prognostication for the year to come." I shall 
probably trouble you soon with another packet. Abo.ut 
the gloomy month of November, when " the people of 
England hang and drown themselves," any thing generally 
is better than one's own thought. 

Fond as I may be of my own productions, it is not for 
their sake that I am so anxious to send you them. I am 
ambitious, covetously ambitious of being known to a gen- 
tleman whom I am proud to call my countryman : a gen- 
tleman who was a foreign ambassador as soon as he was 
a man, and a leader of armies as soon as he was a soldier; 
and that with an eclat unknown to the usual minions of a 



360 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

court, men who, with all the adventitious advantages of 
princely connexions and princely fortune, must yet, like 
the caterpillar, labor a whole lifetime before they reach 
the wished height, there to roost a stupid chrysalis, and 
doze out the remaining glimmering existence of old age. 
If the gentleman who accompanied you when you did 
me the honor of calling on me, is with you, I beg to be 
respectfully remembered to him. 
I have the honor to be, 

Sir, 
Your highly obliged, and most devoted 
Humble servant, 

R. B. 



XXX. 
TO MR. THOMSON. 



[Cromek informed me, on the authority of Mrs. Burns, that the 
" handsome, elegant present" mentioned in this letter, was a common 
worsted shawl. 



February, 1796. 

Many thanks, my dear sir, for your handsome, elegant 
present to Mrs. Burns, and for my remaining volume of 
P. Pindar. Peter is a delightful fellow, and a first 
favorite of mine. I am much pleased with your idea of 
publishing a collection of our songs in octavo, with etch- 
ings. I am extremely willing to lend every assistance in 
my power. The Irish airs I shall, cheerfully undertake 
the task of finding verses for. 

'I have already, you know, equipt three with words. 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 361 

and the other day I strung up a kind of rhapsody to 
another Hibernian melody, which I admire much. 

Awa' wi' your witchcraft o' beauty's alarms. 

If this will do, you have now four of my Irish engage- 
ment. In my by-past songs I dislike one thing, the name 
Chloris — I meant it as the fictitious name of a certain 
lady ; but, on second thoughts, it is a high incongruity to 
have a Greek appellation to a Scottish pastoral ballad. Of 
this, and some things else, in my next : I have more 
amendments to propose. What you once mentioned of 
"flaxen locks" is just : they cannot enter into an elegant 
description of beauty. Of this also again — Grod bless 
you !* 

R. B. 



XXXI. 

TO MR. Clarke, 

SCHOOL :M ASTER, FORFAR 



[Who will say, after readhigtlie following distressing letter, lately 
come toliglit, that Barns did not die in great poverty.] 



Dumfries, 25/ A June, 1796. 
My Dear Clarke. 

Still, still the victim of affliction ! Were you to see 
the emaciated figure who now holds the pen to you, you 
would not know your old friend. Whether I shall ever 



* Our poet never explained what name he would have substituted 
for Chloris. — Mr. Thomson. 
31* 



362 ORIGINAL LETTERS. 

get about again, is only known to Him, the Great 
Unknown, whose creature I am. Alas, Clarke ! I begin 
to fear the worst. 

As to my individual self, I am tranquil, and would 
despise myself if I were not ; but Burns's poor widow, 
and half-a-dozen of his dear little ones — helpless orphans ! 
— there I am weak as a woman's tear. Enough of this ! 
'Tis half of my disease. 

1 duly received your last, enclosing the note. It came 
extremely in time, and I am much obliged by your punc- 
tuality. Again I must request you to do me the same 
kindness. Be so very good as, by return of post, to 
enclose me another note. I trust you can do it without 
inconvenience, and it will seriously oblige me. If I must 
go, I shall leave a few friends behind me, whom I shall 
regret while consciousness remains. I know I shall live 
in their remembrance. Adieu, dear Clarke, that I shall 
ever see you again is, I am afraid, highly improbable. 

R. B. 



XXXII. 
TO MR. JAMES ARMOUR, 

MASON, MAIJCHLINE. 



[The original letter is now in a safe sanctuary, the hands of the 
poet's son, Major James Glencairn Burns.] 



July, lOa [1796.] 

For Heaven's sake and as you value the we[l] fare of 
your daughter and my wife, do, my dearest sir, write to 
Fife, to Mrs. Armour to come if possible. My wdfe 



ORIGINAL LETTERS. 363 

thinks she can yet reckon upon a fortnight. The medical 
people order me, as I value my existence, to fly to sea- 
bathing and country-quarters, so it is ten thousand chances 
to one that I shall not be within a dozen miles of her 
when her hour comes. What a situation for her, poor 
girl, without a single friend by her on such a serious 
moment. 

I have now been a week at salt-water, and though I 
think I have got some good by it, yet I have some secret 
fears that this business will be dangerous, if not fatal. 
Your most affectionate son, 

R. B. 



FINIS. 



LBJ, 



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